Comments on: Wikimedia Multimedia UX testing videos

By: Dami

Dami — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:48:29 +0000

You’re right, I had the mwembed thingy enabled as a gadget, though no idea what it was for – apparently this is responsible for the “new” player that I have started seeing suddenly which has some quite nice features.
(The native browser video support is also quite acceptable nowadays , so a default embed code might be shown on the video’s description page – and for that matter, maybe even on the image pages there could be a “share/use” button.)

By: Guillaume Paumier

Guillaume Paumier — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:15:23 +0000

Sage, the videos are embedded straight from Commons. I’m using Michael Dale’s MwEmbed thingie. It is still very experimental, though, and I didn’t really want to use it in the first place because it relies on unstable assets such as http://prototype.wikimedia.org .

Bence is right that it’s not enabled by default on Commons; you have to use a special trick to make the new player show, and it has indeed an integrated embedding support, as well as closed captioning. To enable it for a specific video, you have to add a special call at the end of the URL, for example http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Multimedia_usability_project_2010_-_Prototype_testing.ogv?withJS=MediaWiki:MwEmbed.js

There are some complications with WordPress though, namely some quirks with the Wysiwyg preview. The code snippet has to be inserted in HTML view, but WordPress doesn’t handle it properly. When you switch to Wysiwyg view, it surrounds it with additional code which makes it not work, unless you save the article from the code view and never again open the Wysiwyg version. Quite inconvenient! I’ve talked to Michael about it, and he said they may devote some resources to fix this, possibly by creating a plugin to port the Add-media-wizard to WordPress.

Bence, I don’t think the new player is enabled by default on the English Wikipedia either; see for example this video, which still uses the default OggHandler player developed by Tim Starling. The new player is available as a gadget in the user preferences, though, as part of MwEmbed, both on the English Wikipedia and on Commons.

I can completely understand the rationale for not wanting to enable it by default considering it’s still experimental. But at some point in the future, we’ll have all these nifty features available in MediaWiki or extensions, and Commons will just rock :)

By: Dami

Dami — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:16:47 +0000

I think this is the default embeddable player you get nowadays on the English Wikipedia and it has built in embedding support – it doesn’t seem to have full screen support though… For some reason this player is not available on Commons, which is strange and confusing.

By: Sage Ross

Sage Ross — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:47:37 +0000

Hey, this embedded video player looks and works really well! HTML 5 stuff is getting better very rapidly; last time I remember testing one, it wasn’t nearly this good! Are these videos straight from Commons, or hosted on your server? What plugin or code do you use for embedding the videos?

(And great post, by the way. I’m really excited about the new uploader.)