The current preview image system is limiting. A user can only have one size of preview image and has little control over how that preview is created (ie cropping instead of letterboxing). I think the best way to solve this problem is to integrate the module with imagecache so that users can draw upon the vast collection of imagecache plugins to format their preview images the way they want. This has the added benefit of allowing users to have different sized preview images when creating views of their BD videos. I am going to see if I can hack together a patch today, but any help is greatly appreciated.

Love the module! I am using it for a student media site launching in the fall.

Comments

gumdrop’s picture

gumdrop commented

Would be interesting to see if this would some how work with:
http://drupal.org/project/cck_gallery

stickgrinder’s picture

stickgrinder commented

I quote this! ImageCache integration is almost a must-have. After all every website that provides video tends to be a complex (often social) reality, so having lot of different views is mandatory.
Any clue about progress in this direction?

Adrian Freed’s picture

Adrian Freed commented

The lack of ImageCache integration is a show stopper for me.

janis_lv’s picture

janis_lv commented

I agree that this would be great.

jbrown’s picture

jbrown commented

In some ways Storage API is superior to ImageCache. In other ways it is not.

Storage API has a file generation API that Blue Droplet Video uses to scale the preview images. The images are generated in their first request (like ImageCache) and then stored wherever their class is configured to. So you can push your thumbnails out to Amazon S3. You can't do this with ImageCache.

Storage API is considerably more versatile the core's file handling.

BDV has excellent views integration. You can configure whatever size of thumbnail you want in the Preview image field configuration. http://planetdrupal.tv/popular

ImageCache cannot do the correct sort of scaling. BDV creates scaled images to an exact size and maintains aspect ratio. The source image is scaled to fit either the width or height (or both) exactly (whichever is possible). Black borders are added TV-style where the aspect ratio differs. I have tried all the ImageCache settings and am unable to reproduce this functionality.

BDV captures the raw frames for preview images as lossless png. Once scaled, they are saved as progressive jpeg for delivery to the browser. ImageCache is unable to convert between formats.

These transformations could of course be implemented using ImageCache's API.

The fact that ImageCache has a transformation API is incredibly powerful.

So - it might make sense for BDV to use ImageCache's transformations / styles, but it will definitely keep using Storage API for file generation.

Additionally, BDV could be extended to dynamically grab thumbnails from arbitrary positions in videos.

jbrown’s picture

jbrown commented
Status: Active » Postponed
janis_lv’s picture

janis_lv commented

Is it possible to have one size for images published on front page, 2nd for node-view?

Thank you!

jbrown’s picture

jbrown commented

Yes - create a view and put it on the front page.

janis_lv’s picture

janis_lv commented

I'm doing already so, created a block for this. :)
Thanks anyway!