Now that my customer has made their requirements more complicated, I actuall understand them better. Now that I do, I wonder if Emfield can do this, or do I need to look elsewhere?

We need to be able to specify a node as having more than one video file included (I believe this is what audio people would call a playlist). Presently we are planning for only two, but I bet within 6 months they will want more. The displayed thumbnail should be built from a specified (generally the second one, as the first may be an advertisement) video. On node display, the videos should be displayed in the order entered. I think this is much like the TV networks showing programs, where they have a thumbnail from the program, and the program itself is divided into segments (much like the original broadcast), with advertisements preceding each segment.

Can Emfield do this (in D5 for now)? If so, can you, please, give me a brief overview of how to do it? I know Drupal fairly well, but videos are not my forté.

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nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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commented

Oh, this needs to be simple enough for people who normaly use MS Word as their text editor.

aaron’s picture

aaron commented
Status: Active » Postponed

Neat project! Emfield doesn't do this out of the box, and certainly not the d5 version (which is far behind in functionality). However, it wouldn't take too much to allow it to, I imagine.

You might want to look at http://drupal.org/project/xspf_playlist -- that would create a playlist for the jw flv player. That player does support YouTube playlist, but I'm not sure if that module does. Worth a try at least.

However, it's not clear from your post if this is meant for external or local videos. For local videos, it gets even more complicated, especially the thumbnail generation, for which you'd also want to look at either the Media Mover or Flash Video modules.

On a second read, it appears you're actually specifying a leader video. I've done that just fine w/ Embedded Media Player (using jw flash player). It requires digging into the javascript api for the flash player, but isn't all that difficult. Again, it might be great to generalize that in the module, although with the Media sprint, I have no free time for such fun projects.

Good luck.

aaron’s picture

aaron commented

here's the link for the javascript api you would need to tap: http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/wiki/FlashApi

aaron’s picture

aaron commented
Category: support » feature
nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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Primary language English
Location Boston
commented

Thanks for responding. This will be local videos. I suppose at some time they may want to use some YouTube, but hopefully that will be after we get up to D6 (or 7).

I haven't had a need to look at the SWF/XSPF stuff in a while, but the last time I did, it seemed to be a D5 dead-end, which doesn't thrill me (I'm hoping the D6 conversion comes soon). I'm trying to do this with a minimum of effort because the conversion may be soon and because I other projects I have to finish at the moment.

EDIT: Okay, I see that XSPF_Playlist is okay for 6.x, other than lack of responsiveness from its maintainer.

Yes, this is more of what I would understand "leader video" to mean. And may more accurately describe the need. Some of our sponsors provide "info-videos" (something like the informational part of an infomercial) and some of our experts do educational videos. Our sponsors want to be able to stick a 30 second commercial on the front of some of these (I'm sure you've encountered this practice elsewhere on the web). In practice, what would be better for us is to tell the "leader" to insert itself in such-and-such video or node, rather than having to edit the video node to add the leader. I may have to write a special hook for xspf_playlist to do this.