On Tuesday, July 29, 2014, Brian Wolff <bawolff@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> * [[Media:]] or other direct file links, often used for pronunciation
> markers in Wikipedia articles, are not picked up by this system. Need to
> extend things a bit to detect clicks on such links and display a player
> instead of just downloading the file. Same problem occurs in Safari and IE
> on desktop mode.
Perhaps we should just tell users to stop using "Media:" links. Media
is supposed to be a direct link to a file. Linking to the image
description page would seem more appropriate in such a case (Ideally
with autoplay, although allowing users/potential vandals to autoplay
files seems like a giant bag of worms...).
Auto play is scary indeed. :) there are also technical limitations on iOS that prevent auto play for audio; you have to initialize audio context in response to a user input event (like how the default popup blockers prevent creation of new windows).
To throw out a crazy idea, perhaps we should have a new parameter for
TMH files, something like [[File:Foo.ogg|displaylink|Some text here]],
which outputs "Some text here" as a link, and then launches the player
using js magic when somebody clicks on the link.
I quite like that idea -- might be good as a general parameter that brings up MMV or TMH player or links to the file: page as appropriate...
> * Should we show the video in an overlay like the mobile media viewer for
> images, instead of playing inline? This is a good place to add additional
> controls to reach file info details, as with images. If so should I try to
> extend the same overlay code in MF or create a near-lookalike that lives in
> TMH?
There's an overlay viewer in MF? I don't think that's ever popped up
on my phone.
It may have recently graduated from beta mode; I know it's been getting a ui overhaul recently to feel more consistent with desktop MMV.
I've managed to clone the photo overlay and it looks pretty cool on a phone -- and works for both native and ogv.js playback. But on a tablet view I'm not sure if that's the way to go. Could also consider inline playback with a full screen button that opens the overlay and moves the player into it.
Anyway these are all fungible details that we can work out over time, I'll concentrate on the playback itself for now.
> * Should we have a manual resolution switcher, as on desktop? (Controlling
> source selection via code could also fix a problem with Android being
> unable to play Ogg Theora videos, to force it to WebM which does work
> natively.)
Doesn't android automatically play the first <source> it knows how to
when left to its own devices? Thus skipping the ogg sources?
It looks like I had a broken webm transcode on my test instance; Android is happier playing the webm on my public instance. Yay for consistent behavior! :) I might have to adjust the ram on my vagrant instance...
>
> * On iOS, should the source selector offer to launch higher-res and WebM
> videos in the external VLC app? 360p is about the limit of good performance
> in ogv.js on current A7-based iOS devices, and slower models max out at
> 160p if they can even handle that.
That seems like the sort of thing that would be a nice feature, but of
minor importance.
*nod* I might try hacking it up in London if I have free time. Some folks like their HD. :)
This is all very awesome. Thanks for working on this.
It's been a really fun research project, but I'm super happy that it's going to be actually useful!
-- brion