User:TheDJ/WikimediaPlayer

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The Wikimedia Player is a tool that allows you to playback Ogg audio and video samples on the various wikimedia websites. It was created by User:Gmaxwell and it's basically PHP to do the wikimedia specific stuff, HTML, Javascript and CSS. For the actual playback it can use a JAVA player (Cortado), VLC media player, the HTML5 <video>-tag, or any other embedded player that supports Ogg.

When this versions was released I noticed some problems with VLC detection, and also so the potential for a whole lot of more features for this page. I asked Gmaxwell if I could help out, and he said he welcomed any help.

Related pages[edit]

My work[edit]

There were several things I wanted to fix. My primary goals were:

player independence
fix player detection
add controls for the VLC plugin

You can see the primary result of this in the screenshot to the right, and you can test a demo sample on one of these links.

My current development version supports:

in order of preference and detection: <video>-tag, VLC media player, any generic embedded player, JAVA playback trough Cortado.
Play and Pause control for <video>
Play/pause, full screen, time/length, position slider for VLC media player.
Heavily refactored CSS/JS/HTML
Uses a JS slider by Erik Arvidsson of WebFX [1] licensed under Apache SL 2.0

Tested[edit]

This development is tested and confirmed to work with:

Safari 2.0: VLC plugin and JAVA applet
Firefox 2.0: Mac and Windows, VLC plugin, JAVA applet
Opera 9.2: Windows, VLC plugin, JAVA plugin
Opera 9.2 Video demo: Windows <video>-tag support
IE 6.0: VLC ActiveX, Java applet

I could really use someone with IE 7.0 to test the player as well. Please leave a message if you want to help. If you have another browser that you would like to help test etc, the same goes for you of course :D

More work[edit]

I'm not done by a long shot :D Some stuff I'd still like to work on

I would love to have a genuine designed controller for the player. The currently implemented buttons will work, but a design such as the YouTube or Google Video players have would be much nicer. If you can assist in designing this, PLEASE CONTACT ME
A volume slider (need smaller graphics for that)
Add a special flag to the templates that tells the player to operate in audio or in video mode..
Allow it to work with all wikimedia sites
Add cookie/JS preferences for preferred player, preferred playback size, aspect ratio
Add a "open in standalone player" link specific to you "preferred player". This requires PHP to set a specific content-type + mime for the file.
Credentials and licenses page.
Add support for more embedded players.

Links[edit]

Some stuff I need to remember because it could be useful