Hey guys, I just finished installing flowplayer (video player for my website) on my server but I would like flowplayer to play random videos from a folder on my server everytime the page is refreshed. I have no idea how I could go about doing this. But I'm fairly certain it would involve some PHP, hence why I post my question here. If anybody can point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

how much PHP do you know

My PHP knowledge is very limited, so not that much. But I can manipulate existing PHP code.

This code should accomplish what you're looking for. Make sure to set $path to the path where your videos are stored. Just make sure that directory contains only playable videos, the function I wrote just picks a random file from the given path (or you can use a regular expression to only pick files with a certain extension).

PHP Code:

<?php
function getRandomFile($path)
{
    $files = array();
    
    foreach( new DirectoryIterator($path) as $file )
    {
        if($file->isFile())
        {
            $files[] = $path . $file->getFilename();
        }
    }
    
    $i = array_rand($files);
    return $files[$i];
}

$path = './';

$file = getRandomFile($path);

/*
the following code is from the documentation: 
http://flowplayer.org/documentation/installation/index.html
*/
?>
<a 
    href="<?php echo $file; ?>" 
    style="display:block;width:425px;height:300px;" 
    id="player">
</a>

Thanks for your help. I tried implementing your code as follows but I get a fatal error. Any ideas? The videos are stored in a folder on my server called "vids"

PHP Code:

<?php
function getRandomFile($path)
{
    $files = array();
    
    foreach( new DirectoryIterator($path) as $file )
    {
        if($file->isFile())
        {
            $files[] = $path . $file->getFilename();
        }
    }
    
    $i = array_rand($files);
    return $files[$i];
}

$path = 'http://www.mysite.com/vids';
/*
I also tried just     $path = '/vids'
*/

$file = getRandomFile($path);
?>

/*
the following code is from the documentation:
http://flowplayer.org/documentation/...ion/index.html
*/

<a 
    href="<?php echo $file; ?>" 
    style="display:block;width:425px;height:300px;" 
    id="player">
</a>
<script language="JavaScript">
    flowplayer("player", "/flowplayer-3.1.5.swf");
</script>
<br clear="all" />

My mistake, try:

PHP Code:

function getRandomFile($path)
{
    $files = array();

    foreach( new DirectoryIterator($path) as $file )
    {
        if($file->isFile())
        {
            $files[] = $path . $file->getFilename();
        }
    }

    $i = array_rand($files);
    return $files[$i];
}

$path = './vids';
$url = 'http://mysite.com/';
$file = getRandomFile($path);

echo str_replace('./', $url, $file); 


Now it works. Thanks for your help NullPointer, much appreciate it.

Hey I know this is an old thread, But Im doing the same thing. I use this php code, and it doesnt work. All I get is a page full of code

Have you enclosed it in <?php ?> tag? Is file named something.php?

yes I tried all of that but just wouldnt work. But I did get it to do what I wanted it to do. I used an Image Rotator script and just modified it to use with flv files