Video (or generic embedded content) support?

Hi everyone,

Maybe this is a stupid idea (feel free to insult me then), but I’d love to see video support in MaxiGallery (more specifically, Flash video a la YouTube, with local or remote content). I’m currently using Ditto to show each embedded video on a single page, but it’d be much easier to just put the video url in MaxiGallery, and have all the nice features and effects... Maybe an automatic video podcast too...

I’m even willing to code this (should be easy), but maybe I’m missing something obvious. Like is it useful? Or even possible without rewriting all MaxiGallery?

Thanks!

Video support has been requested before too, but I have not made anything for it and won’t probably make ever.. Contributions concerning this would be greatly appreciated of course.

So, How you think to implement it? Would it get some frame from the beginning of the video for the thumbnail pic and then when the video is opened, it would display it in some flash video player, or what?

Something like that, yes. I think the YouTube API can retrieve the video thumbnail, and for non YouTube content, there’s got to be a way with Flash functions
I’ll try to do something specific to YouTube in the first place, and post it here. If you have any other idea, don’t hesitate

Edit: I just checked, there is a thumbnail_url element in the video_details response (from the youtube.videos.get_details method)

Sounds good.. looking forward to see what you come up with!

I’m interested in getting quicktimes or Flash FLVs to be integrated into MaxiGallery. I know it’s a tall order but I’ll have a look at this and see how to get the thumbnail uploaded/generated and then a subset of options like "is this a movie thumbnail? Yes/No then state image id that’s a movie uploaded" The display of the movies obviously won’t work within the lightbox, or indeed, most of the other image gallery subsystems but I’m looking to make our movies a seamless part (apart from a small play watermark) of our galleries.

Thoughts and ’it’ll never work! comments’ most welcome

Cheers

TXRX

Sounds great.

How about an internal variable: $isVideo, or something similar, that could be used for conditional behavior inside MaxiGallery to bypass the processing/re-sizing that maxigallery does on still pix at upload.

You could also use $isVideo to tailor the output: extract a thumbnail (or not -- I guess you could just use a generic icon and the title for starters), and bypass the "click to enlarge" code when displaying a gallery.

You could have another variable (e.g. $videoFormats) that could be used in the snippet call with a default value of:

$videoFormats=`avi,wmv,mov,mpg,rm,ram,swf`

It could be used to set $isVideo and would let people add more video formats or custom browser-handled formats in the future.

It might not be a bad idea to have two other variables, $isStill, and $isGeneric, so that you could really fine tune the handling and make things truly flexible for future use along with $stillFormats, and $genericFormats.

I’m just thinking out loud here. Feel free to ignore my musings.



Bob

That’s what I was thinking too. As we’ve seen on other threads there is the file upload snippet in the repositry but I’m planning on making this as seamless as possible to all the users and I’ve already got the ’movie upload’ snippet plugged in on the same maxigallery page. it’s just rather broken for me since I’m just wanting one upload system for the end users to deal with.

Thus is the desire to hack/edit Maxigallery and make it handle the movies properly. There are some snippets already in existence that I’ll no doubt pillage for code such as the simple movie player snippet and possibly the file upload snippet if I’ve got to make alternative calls to manage larger files etc.

By all means think out loud anytime. I’ll be doing the same till this gets completed!
Cheers

TXRX

Quote from: TXRX at Apr 30, 2007, 08:07 AM

That’s what I was thinking too. As we’ve seen on other threads there is the file upload snippet in the repositry but I’m planning on making this as seamless as possible to all the users and I’ve already got the ’movie upload’ snippet plugged in on the same maxigallery page. it’s just rather broken for me since I’m just wanting one upload system for the end users to deal with.

Thus is the desire to hack/edit Maxigallery and make it handle the movies properly. There are some snippets already in existence that I’ll no doubt pillage for code such as the simple movie player snippet and possibly the file upload snippet if I’ve got to make alternative calls to manage larger files etc.

By all means think out loud anytime. I’ll be doing the same till this gets completed!
Cheers

TXRX

I was thinking that if you just implemented $videoformats and $isvideo carefully and added some conditional code to MaxiGallery, it might be possible to allow uploading video files in the standard MaxiGallery way and allow clicking to play them without breaking any existing MaxiGallery installations.

I haven’t looked that hard at the code (no time--what else is new) so there could well be something I’m missing. I think the .png, .gif, and .jpg extensions may be hard coded in the depths of MaxiGallery, though, which could pose a problem. I had assumed that something like $allowable_file_types would be a variable somewhere but I couldn’t find it.

I thought that just putting <code>if $isVideo { existing code } </code> in would do most of the work but I’m not sure the structure will allow it.

Bob





Bob

Just a quick update on what’s happening with this. I’ve discovered that I can upload quicktimes into maxigallery and it accepts .mov but it doesn’t show up in the image list etc. In an exercise in speed over knowledge (ie: My reverse engineering MaxiGallery would have taken much longer than I wanted and I’m looking for a simple show image and thumbnail gallery)

I’ve created a script that looks up the MaxiGallery DB for images that relate to the article/page id and gets a list of files from it. Then I get it to file-search for a quicktime that matches the same filename in the related articles media folder.

If it finds a match then it adds a PNG watermark (little play button) and changes the link to show the quicktime as opposed to just the larger image. It also generates the watermarked thumbnail once and there is a check for a wm_ prefix as opposed to a tn_ prefix since I’ve got the watermark function to write out a wm_ prefixed thumbnail.

I had a heck of a time finding a watermark script that I could include into the code but it’s working and I’ve got a completely automated integration and handling of quicktimes in the little gallery script.

I plan to get round to integrating this behaviour into MaxiGallery at some point. I’d like to take advantage of the Maxigallery’s various display options and systems but for now I’m using MaxiGallery to manage the media uploading and editting but when it’s being shown I’m using my own custom script.

Updates hopefully will follow.

Cheers

TXRX