The Ourmedia Home Page Media Player

Here is a brief overview of the current Ourmedia home page media player. This player is used in two places: the ourmedia.org home page and the channels' home pages.

• The player is composed of three visual parts:
  • The thumbnail scroller - this is just a series of images inside of a div with overflow set. All actions are implemented via javascript. Clicking on a thumbnail loads a page inside the viewer iframe with the appropriate embedded media object code and parameters. The information used to build each thumbnail and it's corresponding onclick handler comes from the mediaRSS feeds for the given channel (the ourmedia.org front page media player uses the feed from the "Media showcase" group (nid=3)
  • The viewer or player area - this is simply an iframe element in the theme template that is used to display the embedded media player and the media. There is an autostart parameter to control automatic playing of the media. The iframe displays a "screenshot" or "preview" image initially when autostart is set to "false". Clicking on the image or on the information area "play" button loads the player object and starts playing.
  • The information area - a set of divs that are used to display links and information about the currently selected media item.

All html and php code for these operations resides in one of the following places:

• the custom mediarss and homepage modules
• the ourmedia-downes theme template files (see also featured_video.php, style.css and homepage.js)
• the media player objects and associated files in ourmedia-downes/players

We currently support the following embedded player objects:

• Apple Quicktime
• Windows Media
• Adobe Flash
• DIVX
• Real Media
• Images

This provides support for the following formats/extensions:

• Video: MPG, MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, M4V, MOV, QT, QTZ, WMA, DIVX, AVI, SWF, FLV
• Audio: MP3, M4A, RA
• Images: JPEG, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, SVG, TIFF

We can display videos from:

• archive.org, blip.tv, youtube.com, aol.com, revver, v-social, google and many others

Notes:

• Currently, player selection is based on find and "extension" in a media url. For example, we currently use the Quicktime player to play ".mp3" files. We plan to allow users to override the default currently used and select other compatible players.
• The current player also supports embedded media in the content. In this case, it simply displays the content without any additional embedded media. These items do not generate enclosures in the media RSS feeds at this time.
• We currently use the Jeroen Wijering Flash Video Player for .flv files. There is also a small Quicktime movie (QT.mov) that is used to load videos into the quicktime player.
• The media pages on Ourmedia.org utilize a similar, but less up to date viewer. We are in the process of replace it with the one described above.