player

JD asked me to look at the 1pixelout player for use in the Learning Center. I had already set it up for use on channels.ormedia.org so I decided to deploy what was there and document it in the last post.

Since I was so close to being able to use it on the media pages, I added an alternate player and widget copy to the audio media pages. I'm sure we will enhance this and offer a selection of players, but it's a nice start.

Here's a snapshot of what it looks like on an audio page.

Here is an example of how the player is embedded:

Here is the player:

Update: the "new" player is in the middle of a major overhaul and I'm busy with other things like login issues and safari weirdness. So the player may not show for a while. Be patient and it will return.

We have a general goal of making channelitem entry smarter and easier. To that end, we allow various url formats from hosting services such as youtube.com and blip.tv. A new feature is that you can now paste a url into the "Body" field instead of the more hidden "Media URL" field. If the system spots a lonely url in the body and none in the Media URL field, it will use the one in the body. Should make life easier, especially if people don't know where to put links to videos.

JD pointed me to ustream.tv the other day. Like many sites these days, this uses a custom Flash player and offers the usual "Share" options of both "Permalink" and "Embed" options. This is a general pattern and we could actually create a form for adding new players based on two initial samples like these:

and

We now support .asf formated media url's in the Ourmedia player.

Example: here's one from priceline.com

Here it is in action:

http://nextgen.ourmedia.org/priceline-com-video-test

I have enhanced the Ourmedia player to better handle youtube.com videos. People often pasted the "wrong" url (e.g., the one for the page, not the one for the video). The media display parser will now accept either page or video url's from youtube in the mediaurl field and display the proper result.

Also, it is no longer necessary to add a preview image for youtube videos as we can now display the default youtube preview image. Here is an example.

See previous post about thumbs. We hope to add automatic thumbnails for youtube, blip and archive videos soon.

I have been enhancing the embedded player and swatting the various bugs that are shaking out as a result. You can now pass "color" and "bgcolor" parameters to get more of the player to match the embedding site. Still need to expose links, fonts, thumb borders and labels to reach minimal customization requirements. Also need to expose all "Flashparams" for open source players in order to control their colors, etc. Each step makes for cleaner embedding.

The biggest win on this is that the next deployed version of staging will have only one player in use instead of two. Even the Ourmedia home page player will be embedded just like it is on my blog and in an earlier post here in the Ourmedia Tools blog.