User:TheDJ/WikimediaPlayer

The Wikimedia Player is a tool that allows you to playback Ogg audio and video samples on the various wikimedia websites. It was created by User:Gmaxwell and it's basically PHP to do the wikimedia specific stuff, HTML, Javascript and CSS. For the actual playback it can use a JAVA player (Cortado), VLC media player, the HTML5 -tag, or any other embedded player that supports Ogg.

When this versions was released I noticed some problems with VLC detection, and also so the potential for a whole lot of more features for this page. I asked Gmaxwell if I could help out, and he said he welcomed any help.

Related pages

 * Try the player
 * Commons video template
 * en.Wikipedia video template
 * Commons listen template
 * en.Wikipedia listen template
 * mw:Extension:Player from de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb

My work
There were several things I wanted to fix. My primary goals were:
 * 1) player independence
 * 2) fix player detection
 * 3) add controls for the VLC plugin

You can see the primary result of this in the screenshot to the right, and you can test a demo sample on one of these links.
 * development on primary site
 * stable dev on backup site

My current development version supports:
 * 1) in order of preference and detection: -tag, VLC media player, any generic embedded player, JAVA playback trough Cortado.
 * 2) Play and Pause control for
 * 3) Play/pause, full screen, time/length, position slider for VLC media player.
 * 4) Heavily refactored CSS/JS/HTML
 * 5) Uses a JS slider by Erik Arvidsson of WebFX  licensed under  Apache SL 2.0

Tested
This development is tested and confirmed to work with:
 * Safari 2.0: VLC plugin and JAVA applet
 * Firefox 2.0: Mac and Windows, VLC plugin, JAVA applet
 * Opera 9.2: Windows, VLC plugin, JAVA plugin
 * Opera 9.2 Video demo: Windows -tag support
 * IE 6.0: VLC ActiveX, Java applet

I could really use someone with IE 7.0 to test the player as well. Please leave a message if you want to help. If you have another browser that you would like to help test etc, the same goes for you of course :D

More work
I'm not done by a long shot :D Some stuff I'd still like to work on
 * I would love to have a genuine designed controller for the player. The currently implemented buttons will work, but a design such as the YouTube or Google Video players have would be much nicer. If you can assist in designing this, PLEASE CONTACT ME
 * A volume slider (need smaller graphics for that)
 * Add a special flag to the templates that tells the player to operate in audio or in video mode..
 * Allow it to work with all wikimedia sites
 * Add cookie/JS preferences for preferred player, preferred playback size, aspect ratio
 * Add a "open in standalone player" link specific to you "preferred player". This requires PHP to set a specific content-type + mime for the file.
 * Credentials and licenses page.
 * Add support for more embedded players.

Links
Some stuff I need to remember because it could be useful
 * Apple's plugin detection scripts
 * scripted WM controls
 * embedding QT
 * embedding WM
 * VLC embedding+control demo