Good morning from San Francisco, Multimedians!
The Multimedia team just finished their weekly planning meeting, and we
decided it would be a fantastic first step to write a quick email each
week describing what sorts of things we're working on and what you can
expect out of us in the coming weeks and months.
== Release-level ==
On the release level, we've made a few plans in our most recent meeting.
We intend to push back our planned release of MultimediaViewer [0] a few
weeks, pending a better view of how well we're doing with estimating our
velocity and keeping it up. If we do really well, we may release it to
MediaWiki.org as the default for logged-in users as soon as March 13th.
Other releases will follow in a staggered manner.
== Last week ==
As this release is focused 100% on finishing MultimediaViewer so we can
release it to wider audiences, last week's accepted cards [1] are no
surprise:
* Several bugfixes to CSS and JavaScript alike, including a nasty bug
involving keyup event handlers [2], a stubborn bug having to do with
foreign database image repositories [3], and a bug arising out of our
lazy-loading patch from the prior week [4]. Also a fix for a race condition
when loading many images quickly. [5]
* Work on technical debt, in particular consolidating the spaghetti code
strung between two class systems into our single "mmv" module set. [6]
* Showing permissions that are more complicated to the user, instead of
just the license name [7] [8] - this is a big win for Commons, where
file permissions can sometimes be...well, a little hairy. :)
* Loading a fuzzy thumbnail of the image while the bigger image is loading
in the interface [9] - gives you a more consistent viewing experience
that doesn't seem as choppy.
== This week ==
Notable cards we've scheduled or continued working on this week include [10]:
* Share [11] and embed [12] features for the lightbox, using oojs-ui that
is newly in core. We'll be giving you wikitext and HTML code that you
can copy and have images on-wiki or off. Also we'll have an easy link
to the image that you can share on whatever Flitter or Macebook site
your heart desires. I'll be sending a separate mail about this shortly
to update you and be a little more verbose.
* Metrics for MultimediaViewer [13] - we've put this off long enough, it's
high time we had dashboards! These will show you things like how many
times the close button is used, how many times people go into fullscreen,
and also load times for images, metadata, and more.
* Download interface for files [14] - this will use the same panel as share
and embed, but will be slightly differently organized.
== Future ==
If you have any questions or suggestions for the Multimedia team regarding
this release, or any of the work we're doing, feel free to contact us
on- or off-list. We'll try to be better about using this list in coming
weeks, and we hope you'll enjoy the updates :)
You can also find us in #wikimedia-multimedia on irc.freenode.net, and
you can leave feedback about our various products on the subpages of our
team page on MediaWiki.org [15].
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MultimediaViewer
[1] http://ur1.ca/gpp1a
[2] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/236
[3] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/217
[4] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/254
[5] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/242
[6] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/177
[7] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/118
[8] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/197
[9] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/146
[10] http://ur1.ca/gpp39
[11] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/147
[12] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/148
[13] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/54
[14] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/79
[15] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
Thanks for reading, and have a good week!
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
Hi!
A brief note to talk about the progress and status of the share [0] and
embed [1] features of MultimediaViewer, why they're taking so bloody long,
and what's left to sort out.
I've written out the interfaces, most of the code handling thumbnail URL
fetching, size determinations, and (en|dis)abling various interface things
depending on what the selections are currently. You can currently open
the panel and get HTML that works, Wikitext that works, and a link that
works.
The problems that remain are basically making sure you can get the embed
codes that you want, instead of ones you don't, and making sure the stuff
you select is what actually gets applied to the code.
We also are looking towards having tests available for all of these things
so it's not terribly difficult to maintain, and I also want to split the
code into multiple different files so I don't have to maintain a single,
intractable 800+ line file with all different parts of the panel in it.
Those parts may be split off and merged later in the week, though.
If you're curious about the work currently being done on these features,
you can look at the open WIP patchset on Gerrit [2], ask questions here,
or corner the developers on IRC [3].
[0] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/147
[1] https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/148
[2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/112928
[3] #wikimedia-multimedia on irc.freenode.net [4]
[4] 'Play "stomp the developers" live on irc://irc.freenode.net/#mediawiki!' [5]
[5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/quips.cgi?action=show
--
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
Hi everyone,
We’d like to give you a quick update on Media Viewer and get your feedback on next steps, as we get ready to release it more widely.
1. Overview
We have been making good progress with beta version v0.2 of Media Viewer (1), with a focus on a better user interface, faster image load, more file info and attributions -- as well as improved 'Use this file' tools (e.g.: share, embed, download).
2. Release Plan
In coming weeks, we plan to release this version v0.2 gradually out of beta, starting with limited tests on a few pilot sites at the end of this quarter. Based on pilot test results, we plan a wider release of Media Viewer v0.2 next quarter. We’d appreciate your comments on our proposed release plan (2). Is there anything we could do to improve it? Anything missing? Note that this version only supports the most widely used image file formats — other media types such such as audio, video or PDF slides will be supported in future releases.
3. Testing
We would be grateful if you could help us test the latest beta version, by following our simple testing tips (3). Note the latest features can be found on our beta site, but it is very slow. For better performance, you can test last week’s features on MediaWiki.org. We release every Thursday on MediaWiki.org, then Monday on Commons and sister sites, then the following Thursday on all wikis.
4. Feedback
After you’ve tried the latest version, we would love to hear your feedback on our Media Viewer discussion page (4), so we can address the most critical issues before wider deployment. Note that we still have a lot of work to do, so we may not be able to address all your suggestions right away.
5. Pilot sites
We are now approaching a few pilot sites to test Media Viewer by default at the end of March. Would you recommend pilot sites that you think would be open to experimenting with this feature early? We are looking for small sites with tech-savvy communities that are open to new features. So far, we’ve reached out to French, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Swedish and Vietnamese community members who expressed interest in this project. Anyone else we should be contacting? (e.g. non-Wikipedia site)
6. Key features
Are there any key features you think are needed before we turn on Media Viewer by default for all users? For example, do you think we need to offer an opt-out preference for people who don't want this feature? (We’re not sure this preference is needed, because you can already shift-click or control-click to bypass Media Viewer and open files directly on Commons — but we would like to hear what you and others think.) Anything else that you consider a must-have feature for wider deployment?
7. Thanks
We are grateful to all the community members who helped create this tool. This product was developed in discussions held throughout 2013 (5) — and we then received invaluable feedback (6) from some of the 12,000+ beta testers who enabled Media Viewer around the world since November. The suggestions they kindly gave us have helped improve this tool and many of them are now being implemented, as part of our current release plan (7).
We really appreciate your wonderful contributions and look forward to our next steps together — so we can all bring a better multimedia experience to our users!
Fabrice, on behalf of the Multimedia Team
_______________________________
(1) About Media Viewer:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(2) Media Viewer Release Plan:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
(3) How to test Media Viewer
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#How_can_I_help…
(4) Media Viewer Discussion Page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(5) Multimedia Roundtables:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables
(6) Community Feedback:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer#Feedback
(7) Current Release Tasks (Mingle):
http://ur1.ca/gmfft
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hi all,
the Multimedia team had some discussions recently about how to make our
work more transparent and more open to volunteers, and we decided to try
using an open subscription mailing list for team discussions, instead of
the current practice of cc-ing each member manually. These discussions are
about day-to-day details of our work; sometimes feature requirements or
design, sometimes technical details. The volume is typically one or two new
threads per day.
We weren't sure how much members of this list would be interested in such
conversations and didn't want to flood this list with mails that are not
useful for most members, but we also do not want to split conversation
channels unnecessarily. Please help us by telling whether you would be
interested in the topics mentioned above, or would prefer if we created a
new mailing list for them.
Thanks!
Gergő
In case anybody's interested but not on wikitech-l; looking for some
feedback on possible directions for fallback in-browser video players.
-- brion
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 6:43 AM
Subject: Re: ogv.js - JavaScript video decoding proof of concept
To: Wikimedia-tech list <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Just an update on this weekend project, see the current demo in your
browser[1] or watch a video of Theora video playing on an iPhone 5s![2]
[1] https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_qSfHPhGcA
* Got some fixes and testing from one of the old Cortado maintainers --
thanks Maik!
* Audio/video sync is still flaky, but everything pretty much decodes and
plays properly now.
* IE 10/11 work, using a Flash shim for audio.
* OS X Safari 6.1+ works, including native audio.
* iOS 7 Safari works, including native audio.
Audio-only files run great on iOS 7 devices. The 160p video transcodes we
experimentally enabled recently run *great* on a shiny 64-bit iPhone 5s,
but are still slightly too slow on older models.
The Flash audio shim for IE is a very simple ActionScript3 program which
accepts audio samples from the host page and outputs them -- no proprietary
or patented codecs are in use. It builds to a .swf with the open-source
Apache Flex SDK, so no proprietary software is needed to create or update
it.
I'm also doing some preliminary research on a fully Flash version, using
the Crossbridge compiler[3] for the C codec libraries. Assuming it performs
about as well as the JS does on modern browsers, this should give us a
fallback for old versions of IE to supplement or replace the Cortado Java
player... Before I go too far down that rabbit hole though I'd like to get
peoples' opinions on using Flash fallbacks to serve browsers with open
formats.
As long as the scripts are open source and we're building them with an open
source toolchain, and the entire purpose is to be a shim for missing
browser feature support, does anyone have an objection?
[3] https://github.com/adobe-flash/crossbridge
-- brion
On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> TL;DR SUMMARY: check out this short, silent, black & white video:
> https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ -- anybody interested in a side
> project on in-browser audio/video decoding fallback?
>
>
> One of my pet peeves is that we don't have audio/video playback on many
> systems, including default Windows and Mac desktops and non-Android mobile
> devices, which don't ship with Theora or WebM video decoding.
>
> The technically simplest way to handle this is to transcode videos into
> H.264 (.mp4 files) which is well supported by the troublesome browsers.
> Unfortunately there are concerns about the patent licensing, which has held
> us up from deploying any H.264 output options though all the software is
> ready to go...
>
> While I still hope we'll get that resolved eventually, there is an
> alternative -- client-side software decoding.
>
>
> We have used the 'Cortado <http://www.theora.org/cortado/>' Java applet
> to do fallback software decoding in the browser for a few years, but Java
> applets are aggressively being deprecated on today's web:
>
> * no Java applets at all on major mobile browsers
> * Java usually requires a manual install on desktop
> * Java applets disabled by default for security on major desktop browsers
>
> Luckily, JavaScript engines have gotten *really fast* in the last few
> years, and performance is getting well in line with what Java applets can
> do.
>
>
> As an experiment, I've built Xiph's ogg, vorbis, and theora C libraries
> cross-compiled to JavaScript using emscripten<https://github.com/kripken/emscripten>and written a wrapper that decodes Theora video from an .ogv stream and
> draws the frames into a <canvas> element:
>
> * demo: https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/
> * code: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js
> * blog & some details:
> https://brionv.com/log/2013/10/06/ogv-js-proof-of-concept/
>
> It's just a proof of concept -- the colorspace conversion is incomplete so
> it's grayscale, there's no audio or proper framerate sync, and it doesn't
> really stream data properly. But I'm pleased it works so far! (Currently it
> breaks in IE, but I think I can fix that at least for 10/11, possibly for
> 9. Probably not for 6/7/8.)
>
> Performance on iOS devices isn't great, but is better with lower
> resolution files :) On desktop it's screaming fast for moderate
> resolutions, and could probably supplement or replace Cortado with further
> development.
>
> Is anyone interested in helping out or picking up the project to move it
> towards proper playback? If not, it'll be one of my weekend "fun" projects
> I occasionally tinker with off the clock. :)
>
> -- brion
>
Hi folks,
We invite you to join our IRC chat about Media Viewer (1), today at 18:00 UTC on #wikimedia-office (2)
We will discuss new features for this multimedia browser, which we developed based on feedback from community and team members like you. Here’s what we’re working on now: faster image load, better user interface, more meta-data, attribution and permissions -- and an improved ‘use this file’ tool with share, embed and download options.
Even if you can’t join the IRC chat, we encourage you to participate on our discussion page for Media Viewer (3), where new features are regularly updated. We would love it if you could try the ones labeled ‘ready for testing’. You can also review our specifications for features that are ‘coming soon’ — and hope you can help test them as well later this month (we release new code every Thursday).
In coming weeks, we will be completing the main features of beta version v0.2, and aim to release it on a few pilot sites at the end of the quarter — with a wider release next quarter. We are also starting design work on the next version v0.3, which will support more media file formats such as audio and video, to be developed next quarter. (4)
We look forward to discussing this project with you via IRC in an hour — and on our discussion page on an ongoing basis. This is a good opportunity to improve these features together — so we can provide a better experience for all our users.
All the best,
Fabrice
on behalf of the Multimedia Team (5)
(1) About Media Viewer:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(2) Media Viewer Chat on IRC:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
(3) Media Viewer Discussion page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer
(4) Media Viewer Next Version v0.3:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#Next_Version
(5) Multimedia Project Hub:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
HelloI would give to propose a discussion for the Allow smoother and easier Wikimedia Commons pictures discovery as a part of GSOC-2014 entry the link to the proposal is :https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Allow_smoother_and_easier_Wikimedia_Commons_pictures_discovery
I therefore request all the members to please go through the proposal and give your valuable suggestions to improve the proposal
Thank YouAalekh Nigam
Hello,I have a proposal for the entry as a GSOC-2014 Project involving Multimedia Viewer given in this link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Allow_smoother_and_easier_Wikimedi…
I request all the members to please go through the proposal go through the proposal and give your valuable suggestions regarding the proposal.
Thank YouAalekh Nigam