Video

Magic Local Video Recipe!

Submitted by aaron on Sun, 2008-07-13 19:39

If you haven't already, make sure to check out Sean Effel's latest Filefield + jQuery Media screencast! As was his earlier Feed API + Emfield video tutorial, this is a joy to watch: he does things in thirteen minutes that took developers hours or more to do even a few short months ago, and that's with a running commentary! By the end of the video, you will have learned a simple way to upload a video (using the light-weight File Field module) and have it properly displayed without any messy configurations or external libraries. Plus, as the recipe uses the jQuery Media plug-in wrapper module, the display will be cross-browser compliant and accessible.

Next on my plate for jQuery Media is to have it be easily added to nodes on an individual basis, so that a media clip could be linked inline and automatically turned into an embedded display. Additionally, I would like to make it an option for Views as well, perhaps as an additional setting. (Although even without that, my upcoming book Drupal Multimedia, to be published in September, goes into some detail about how this can already be done, to create powerful video and audio playlists.)

Playlist Sorting at Air America Radio

Submitted by aaron on Wed, 2008-06-25 13:39

Advomatic just launched a new feature for Air America's player. Users are able to create their own play lists of favorite audio and video clips, and sort them in their preferred order.

To see this functionality in action, you'll need to go to the Air America site, and create a user account. After doing so, launch their player, by pressing on the big Listen Live button on the top left of every page.

Add two or three audio clips by pressing the "+" next to a clip, then go to the video tab and do the same thing.

Finally, go to the Playlist tab. Here, you can click and drag clips to sort them as desired. Go ahead. It's all saved, which you can confirm by going to another tab, logging out, logging back in, etc.

Site recipe follows!

Embedded Media Field gets Thickbox Support!

Submitted by aaron on Mon, 2008-04-07 13:54

The good folks at Zivtech (Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg and Jody Hamilton) have been plugging away at Embedded Media Field while I was away. It has bling now!

Check out their Drupal Video page. Click on a thumbnail, go ahead.

Thickbox!

Here's a screenshot, just in case you didn't do that yet:

It's in the latest dev version, so you should go grab that right now and spice up your site! (You'll need to have the Thickbox module installed as well.

Alex is promising a write-up tutorial soon, so watch out for it!

Plans for jQuery Media and jMedia Support

Submitted by aaron on Tue, 2008-03-25 22:15

I've just created the jQuery Media and jMedia wrapper modules for those two jQuery plugins. I am excited about both of them, which are similar. I'm already using jQuery Media for the audio player for Air America Radio (to be launched next week), and found out about jMedia today while researching other uses for the plugin.

Basically, these plugins will replace links or other text with Multimedia, automatically compatible with the browser. They both support audio and video, and come packed with cool features that I haven't even finished exploring yet.

I'll show you how it works next week after Air America's launch. But I'll let you know, it's really, really cool. Makes developing multimedia intensive sites super easy. And I'll definitely have to put it in Drupal Multimedia, my book that should be published this summer.

I plan to support one or both of them in Embedded Media Field as well, as it should make theming that easier than it currently is. They both already support jQ out of the box, for easier administration.

And that's just the beginning...

YouTube Expands API: Good for Embedded Media Field

Submitted by aaron on Wed, 2008-03-12 22:02

So YouTube just added some new features to their API:

  • Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
  • Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
  • Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
  • Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
  • Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

How does this apply to Embedded Media Field? And how about to Drupal as a whole?

Embedded Media Field still needs to tie into the Media Mover module, firstly, to even allow uploading (harvesting) videos and sending them to YouTube (processing) before storing them in the content field. Once it does that, though, we can get a little smarter. Perhaps allowing users to post responses through the API, which would become YouTube videos showing up in response to a video there, and automatically also becoming a response to the Drupal content.

We can also tap into the custom queries when selecting video to embed.

Finally, we should be able to have more control over the UI, and could use jQuery to control the playback of the video, perhaps autoplaying a few seconds after the page load, or maybe jumping forward to our favorite part of the video. We'll have to see about that.

What does that mean for the Internet? As pointed out by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, Google's just flexing their muscles a bit more, trying to ensure the bulk of video on the Internet goes through GooTube. At least Embedded Media Field is taking a more open approach, independently supporting many other providers, such as Blip.TV, Revver, and Brightcove.

Aaron

Low Hanging Fruit

Submitted by aaron on Thu, 2008-03-06 11:39

During our Drupal Multimedia panel on Monday, Nate Haug (quicksketch) mentioned that soon we will be discontinuing the Image module, and providing a migration for existing Image Nodes to ImageField (or its replacement).

The same thing needs to happen to the Video module. That could happen now. The module that provides a migration path for Video nodes will be king. But they'll also need to tap into the planned hook_file for d7, to keep from being dethroned.

Even if the Video module wants to survive, it will need to migrate from its current 4.6 mindset of video-as-a-node.

I'm just saying.

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The Society for Venturism has chosen me as the recipient of its charity for this year, to hopefully offer me cryonic preservation when the time comes. And this month, Longecity, an excellent forum for the discussion of issues related to extending the lifespan of humans, has offered up a matching grant of up to a thousand dollars to help out! So help out! Please.