Rich media display (video/photos)

jplayer or mediafront as player?

Just another note that Media module will be included in this distro now. Figuring out good playback defaults is the next step to getting it in. I'd rather have 1 good way of doing things than trying to include 5 different ways that requires more configuration.

We need more info to best decide, a comparison of various media playback options with pros and cons or a compatibility chart.

Audio/Video

• soundmanager2
• jplayer
• mediafront
• mediaelement.js
• 1 pixel out
• HTML 5 only

Images/Video

• Lightbox2
• Colorbox

One of the blockers for this is that the drupal.org make file cannot package external dependencies. It sounds like by the end of the year this should hopefully be resolved though, according to http://drupal.org/node/779440

@zirafa: so until that is resolved the makefile has to be downloaded from github. that supports externals. i don`t deem that a blocker

@discipolo: I want to use drupal.org to package the product, because investing and working with Drupal infrastructure is a good thing for everybody, imo. There are other potential workarounds for this, like having the install profile or module pull/download external libraries during the installation process.

having had a go at different players for displaying media files my vote goes to Jplayer

jplayer 2 is well maintained (most recent release date), does video & audio as well as playlist. using native fields in core and javascript libraries. plus its definetly the most straight forward to use.

its better than mediaelement.js (since that uses two different formatters for video/audio and requires libraries module)

mediafront is stable though i find it to complex for our needs

@Gus: The reason to only support photos atm is because it is the easiest to implement and understand. But since it is just using the Media module with some tweaks it should be able to handle other media types like video. Lots of other photo gallery systems (Flickr, Facebook) sneak videos into photo galleries pretty seamlessly without much fanfare.

@Discipolo:
Awesome! Jplayer seems the easiest to theme too (it's just CSS, right?) That is a big +1.

I wonder if JPlayer plays nicely with something like Lightbox2 or Colorbox.

I honestly prefer the Shadowbox for images, because it has no frame.

its better than mediaelement.js (since that uses two different formatters for video/audio and requires libraries module)

Mediaelement is a well-established, popular library that we don't have to maintain ourselves. Using two different formatters makes sense since it applies to two different types of items but we can probably fix that and have one unified formatter that automatically determines whether to use <audio> or <video> depending on the file type. Also we have #1255888: Make Libraries API module optional for review. Not sure why the libraries module dependency is a con though.

comment moved to http://groups.drupal.org/node/149194#comment-696433.

Dave, forgive me, but I just realized the comment I wrote here (and moved) was completely out of context to this issue queue. I moved it to a more suitable spot since it is important to discuss.

although JPlayer also has the option integrated trying to prevent the download of files, it only handles mp3 files.
so html5_media does look promising as a solution for video & audio.

make a views slideshow DDblock of a standard size as a frontpage teaser. Link it content.

Better yet make a Views Slideshow of the front and back of an album cover. All the links go the individuals who made the album possible. Examine a record and look at all the credits. Image a website that links to all the backcover info. Especially those the artist wants to thank. A customer pager in DDblock that flips the album cover over is pretty easy and already has jQuery effects. I'd be willing to make a demo site with that functionality. Its a matter of getting the css correct and think of the standard fields a typical album has. Liken to a getID3 meta tag the producer -sound engineer- band members can all be listed. I'm sure this is easy to do in chaos tools.

Maybe use easing effects to slide from front to back.

Having just completed the wireframes based on the Personas, to me there doesn't appear to be a one size fits all media display solution for all 3 formats: audio, video, and photos. Since we are building a distribution for audio/music applications, it's important to make our first and primary goal a strong and consistent audio display widget for audio singles, albums, and playlists.

A small, medium, and large widget that displays artwork makes the most sense to me. Whether we are showing a single track, an album, or playlist, the display should look more or less the same. A tracklist should be able to include playable and non-playable links.

Check out the link below, which displays 3 sized widgets which I think we can model after (incidentally it uses SoundManager2 for display.) I particularly like that album artwork is an integral part of the player.

http://widgets.beggarspromo.com/tik_final_009/

SoundManager2 seems like the best choice for music and audio sites, and it is already used on many major sites and has good support and maintenance. We can still support video and photo media display via a modal lightbox, which I would argue is the simplest/best way to display visual content for our purposes.

@discipolo

Saw you have made this: https://github.com/discipolo/pushtape_mediaplayer

Any comments? I like the idea of having a piece of middleware to integrate third party sound libraries (similar to the WYSIWYG module), which is generally what I understand to be your approach.

What I would like to see is many input sources -> one standard output. something like:

source file(s) -> media module -> media entities -> everything consolidated into standard player formatter, tied to an album or song, and "widgetable" in an iFrame.

From #1476866: extension feature for uploading files to tracks:

Posted by discipolo on June 19, 2012 at 2:32am
https://github.com/discipolo/pushtape_mediaplayer

heres a sandbox to an extensionfeature that adds filefield and displayconfig. should end up being configurable.

adds a mediafield

possible sources:
- media_soundclud
- upload
players:
- browserbased (html5)
- soundcloud
- jplayer

Good links Gus. The problem I see is most of the current solutions only operate at the field level. This is ok most of the time, but seems not so robust for more than one file at a time. Maybe a Player Views display plugin, similar to Views Cycle, that can take a list of nodes/entities and display them in a player format?

The question I initially posed was whether the media field on tracks should be part of the discography feature or a separate feature.
Has a decision been made?

The question I initially posed was whether the media field on tracks should be part of the discography feature or a separate feature.
Has a decision been made?

I added support for audio files and photos.

Pushtape_photos
This Feature package implements a content type for photoset w/ Colorbox for quick browsing.

Pushtape_audio
A simple file field for audio is added by pushtape_audio . Planning on adding SoundManager2 to it to allow streaming, but first SM2 needs to be approved and added to the external library whitelist #1870938 so that it can be packaged as part of the distro.

#32: Mediafront - keeping an eye on it.