BuddyPress Album – Week #9
This week I did more research then coding for the gsoc proj, bp-album will support audio and video by default so I’m looking for appropriate audio and video players.
For audio you probably already know WP Audio Player and I think is good to be the default audio player: simple, good looking, MIT license, already known by a lot of wordpress users.
For video I have two candidates for now: Flowplayer and VideoPress player:
- Flowplayer is easy customizable and feature rich, there is a GPL free version but it has Flowplayer branding.
- Videopress is the video solution used by wordpress.com and its released under GPL, it’s not only a player but a complete solution for self-hosting video (client player + server soft), so in the future it would be really interesting working on a complete integration with it, but I still haven’t had time for a deep look in it. Also VideoPress has recently been rewritten but the source is 10 months old.
Of course self-hosting video is something that only big communities can afford, but bp-album also support oEmbed urls so most communities will probably use self hosted pics + oEmbed (this could easily be the default configuration). I don’t know if I’ll be able to put in video processing in first version of the video module, if not self hosted video will need to be already encoded.
Sorry for being so late this week, had some unexpected busy days.
If you have some suggestions please leave a comment 
shawn are discussing. 
Stas Sușcov 11:05 am on July 26, 2010 Permalink |
Did you consider using only HTML5 video players, and add oEmbed support for flash videos?
Francesco Laffi 2:35 pm on July 27, 2010 Permalink |
I’ve considered HTML5 video players, but not only them because it’s not widely supported (I wouldn’t care if it was for my website, but it’s intended to be used by a lot of communities).
Instead I’d really like to have degradable HTML5 players, but of course I’d need a flash player also in this case and it needs encoding to webm/ogg/mp4.
Video processing looks pretty complex (I’m looking in different solutions for this), but at least oEmbed is already working good.
Stas Sușcov 8:06 pm on July 29, 2010 Permalink
Found this in my reader today:
http://mediaelementjs.com/
Seems interesting.
Francesco Laffi 10:32 pm on July 29, 2010 Permalink
Thanks! It looks really promising and seem a good solution, HTML5 degradable players with only h264 make things really easier for a basic video module.
shawn 11:20 pm on July 26, 2010 Permalink |
Unless something has changed recently, one huge weakness of the videopress player is that it does not support rtmp/rtmpe streaming. Hence no ability for live streaming. I personally was quite excited when I first heard about videopress, but after finding no live streaming support and 10 month old source code, it was a no-go from the start.
I wouldn’t even consider myself a big community. Most of my clients only have 50-100 members. I simply run a cluster of flashcomm/wowza servers and provide an inexpensive service to them.
Francesco Laffi 10:29 pm on July 29, 2010 Permalink |
Thanks for your suggestions, I agree that the current avaliable source has big cons, I’ll consider it if and when the source get updated