Media area (Aeva Media integration)

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
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Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« on May 7th, 2011, 12:57 PM »Last edited on June 2nd, 2011, 04:27 PM by Nao/Gilles
Feature: Media area
Developer: Nao
Target: everyone
Status: 80% (Aeva Media 2.10 implementation working 99%, work has yet to be done on further integrating AeMe into the Wedge internals, such as using it in place of the attachment system.)
Comment:

I think what most people thought when they heard Arantor and Nao were teaming up on a SMF fork, was "Really? A SMF with Aeva Media and SimpleDesk installed by default? I'm in!". Well, it doesn't have SimpleDesk (yet!), but yes, it has Aeva Media. Officially it loses the 'Aeva' in favor of generic naming, but it's all in there.
The same features you loved before -- now at full speed in Wedge, including all of the features in Aeva Media 2.10, for free. Now if that isn't commitment! The only thing that actually disappears is Highslide -- because of the confusing license, I decided to rewrite it from a cleaner base that allows for use on commercial websites. So, instead of a 30kb gzipped Highslide, we now have a 800-byte gzipped Zoomedia that does the exact same stuff for pictures. Not kidding you. (Support for other media types is being worked on.)

:edit: Zoomedia is now 3 kilobytes after gzipping. Adds better animations, support for HTML divs, and finally works across all major browser versions (including IE6).



Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #3, on August 23rd, 2011, 11:12 AM »
Topic hijacking, but when you say "it doesn't have SimpleDesk (yet!)", are you intimating that there will (may?) eventually be an SD-alike for Wedge? Not a deal breaker or anything (it's not like we currently use SD), just interested for the future...

Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #4, on August 23rd, 2011, 11:16 AM »
The statement was clarifying that we aren't planning on putting SimpleDesk in the core. I have already stated I will be porting SimpleDesk to Wedge in the future, and a lot of the work that goes into what I'm doing with the permissions page and also the plugins system is based on supporting SimpleDesk's needs (which are not actually that far different from most other things once you start looking past names of things and into the heart of what is actually needed)



Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #7, on August 23rd, 2011, 02:53 PM »
To successfully mash two totally different memes, from generations apart...

As any fule kno, the cake is lie.

OK, here's the deal with SimpleDesk from my personal POV. SimpleDesk 2.0 should be released later on today. 23rd August is an important day for me personally and has been the last couple of years or so, so it seems very apt that it should be released today, after all there's been no bugs to speak of for weeks, that needed fixing in the RC, so I just needed to up at do it, really.

There is some stuff that will be committed to trunk after that, namely a limited search feature (limited because it's slow on the basis that I have neither the time nor energy to really polish it, hence it going into their trunk so that whoever comes later can implement it more fully). It is an index style based on the custom index, but without the issue related to PHP 5.3.7 that will break SMF's custom indexes, plus it has the ability to do prefix matching (or it will when I've finished it)

In light of all the stuff that happened, both publicly and not so publicly where I've been rather pissed off with what's happened, I made it very clear that once SD 2.0 final was released, I'd be cutting my ties, less stuff holding me back as it were, less stuff to - as I said at the time - feel tainted by.

Because it's BSD licensed, I'm able to fork my own work and reuse it in a manner more consistent with a mentality I'm happy with; the only reason I came back to work on it earlier this year is because of an arrangement being made with certain people with whom I owed a favour or two to. I do not like the fact that I ended up spending an awful lot of time on something which, ultimately, I've come to regret doing because of all the stuff that dragged it down, not least the overshadowing feeling that it's going to be absorbed into the SM NPO at some point. Though, fortunately, that isn't going to happen today - which means that I have no risk of being dragged in, however inadvertently, into the NPO.[1]

I should note that SD has a BSD licence for all the freedoms it grants, including the freedom to do just that, so I won't hold it against SMF for doing it per se, only for the fact that they would be benefitting, yet again, from my hard work and leaving me little to show for it.

The future, from my POV, involves me developing WedgeDesk for Wedge, making everything leaner and likely rewriting more than porting. This isn't really a bad thing because it means I can take the opportunity to correct some of the mistakes I made in development.
 1. Since, correct me if I'm wrong, active team members of a project are automatically made NPO members. I am currently an active SD team member, and if it became part of the NPO, that would make me an NPO team member by definition.

Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #8, on August 23rd, 2011, 05:08 PM »
New active project members under the NPO are accepted in to the NPO as members by default, but it is not actually a requirement.

If I remember correctly, one can be a project member without being an NPO member, and vice versa - so although currently all active project members are also NPO members, you can stay out of the NPO if you wish and still work on an SM project.

This is because the procedure to add members to a project differs from the one to add members to the NPO, and they have to be done separately in any case. Project members are added by team vote, or as part of a new Project's existing team by an NPO vote(not sure of this at the moment), and the new project members are then added as NPO members by a BoD decision after they have actually joined a project.

I believe one can just say upon joining a team, that they wish not to join the NPO, and the BoD will then simply not add them as members.

Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #9, on August 23rd, 2011, 05:22 PM »
We're getting pretty off topic at this point, but to sum up.
Quote
but it is not actually a requirement.
No, it isn't. But it doesn't work like that in practice. Why would I join a project team for a project that I wouldn't have any say over the administration and direction of? I would note that at least one other person won't contribute to SMF, because they don't feel like they can contribute to a project without having some say over its direction.
Quote
Project members are added by team vote, or as part of a new Project's existing team by an NPO vote(not sure of this at the moment), and the new project members are then added as NPO members by a BoD decision after they have actually joined a project.
In which case then, let's suppose SimpleDesk were taken on by the NPO.

Can anyone, seriously, see my being made part of the project by a vote? Survey says no, which would imply that the team would be quite happy to solicit any contributions made without giving any authority to dictate its future. This says to me that I wouldn't want to contribute...

Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #10, on August 23rd, 2011, 05:33 PM »
Well, I'm not positive as we haven't actually included any new projects yet, but I would think that including a new existing project would also mean accepting it's current team as is, for example like the NPO took over SMF originally. It can't very well work to accept a project, and then ditch it's team...
Unless, we'd be starting a fork of some existing project with a new team, for example like Wedge is doing.

Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #11, on August 23rd, 2011, 05:40 PM »
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I would think that including a new existing project would also mean accepting it's current team as is
Which was my concern, that if SimpleDesk were taken over, I'd be taken with it onto the project team, which I don't want. Alternatively it'd go to a vote, and I wouldn't be taken on.
Quote
It can't very well work to accept a project, and then ditch it's team...
You see the problem then. Either the project would take over SimpleDesk and have no developers, or it takes over SimpleDesk and has me as a developer. Since I don't see it having me as a developer (even if I wanted to, which I don't), it would have to accept said project and find a new developer.
Quote
Unless, we'd be starting a fork of some existing project with a new team, for example like Wedge is doing.
Just like I called it at the time, then...

Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #12, on March 23rd, 2012, 10:12 AM »
So, err... Just wanted to point out that I just restored the Media area on Wedge.org ;)
The importer doesn't deal with AeMe yet, but I transmitted my import notes to TE so that he can easily do the job.

So what's new in Wedge's Media area, compared to SMF's Aeva Media...?

Really, mainly two things:

- the Media area is based upon AeMe 2.1, i.e. the commercial version. (Feature list.)
- the Highslide lightbox (dozens of kilobytes of JavaScript code) was replaced with my very own Zoomedia (4kb of code, 1.75kb gzipped :P), which has the same feature set (except for slideshows and other details), and will eventually match it. Zoomedia is still under development, and its main reason for being, is that the Highslide license is quite unclear and couldn't possibly be used on 'commercial' websites, even if it's just a fan website with a few ads or something. So, Zoomedia's license will be much simpler -- it's the Wedge license -- so you can use it on commercial websites for sure. There you go.

Audio/video embedding is non-existent at best. Wedge is still using JWPlayer at this point, and I'm not sure where to go with it.
- Keeping it? Means that commercial websites need to buy the license... Same problem as with Highslide. (Except that the Highslide problem is fixed now :P)
- If keeping it: staying at the current version will prevent JWP from using its latest improvements. But OTOH it's also the last version that doesn't enforce the watermark logo, ah ah.
- Removing it? That would also mean removing the audio spectrum analyzer, which looks really cool (I do have the source code and I guess I could port it to something else, but... it's not like it'd be enjoyable a task). And then, replacing it with what?
- FlowPlayer? The license is unclear at best, while certainly better than JWPlayer's.
- MediaElementJS? It's a nice replacement indeed. But I don't know if it's ready for use in Wedge. Hadn't been on their website for some time. Last time, everything worked. This time, their audio player is broken... Hmm. And it seems that the volume control never records the current volume. (Although it could be done in JavaScript + cookies if using the non-Flash version of the player.) Also, MEJS currently doesn't support 'proper' playlists. Although Aeva Media's playlist system is 90% custom stuff and just expecting the Flash component to 'play along', I'm not sure it'd be easy to do in MEJS. Maybe even in Flow...
- Something else? What?

It feels like I've had these conversations last year already, it's probably even the case, but now would be, I guess, the right time to look into it again...

Oh, and... ZOOMEDIA FEEDBACK WELCOME :P
Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #13, on September 11th, 2013, 06:30 PM »
So, I'm back to Zoomedia dev... (Actually, reading my post above, I left a LOT of things hanging while waiting for feedback... Meh.)

In the last rev, I removed the 'duration' setting, because I figured it wasn't something more than a handful of people would change at all. So, the duration was set by CSS, and the same duration was hardcoded into the JS file.
In my local version, I made changes to ensure that anyone can change the CSS duration, and then it will automatically be used in the JS.

However, this change doesn't work on browsers that don't support transitions (IE < 9 or < 10, can't remember, some old Safari versions, and other 'version-locked' older browsers.) So, I've ended up hardcoding it as a fallback (again).
The main problem is that if one changes the CSS animation to execute very slowly, older browsers will cut off the animation before it's finished.

It's all very nice, and really it doesn't matter much, but I wanted to know what you guys prefer...

- As few options as possible; CSS-based durations with fallbacks for older browsers.
- All current options except for duration; CSS-based durations with fallbacks for older browsers.
- All current options, including duration (that's a quick revert for me). Durations would be set through JavaScript, like they used to (of course JS would register a CSS animation with that duration, if CSS transitions are supported.)

I've also got an extra setting around... Dunno if I'm going to 'leave a choice' for this. I've got an extra CSS animation that makes the thumbnail "fly away" towards the center of the screen, with a gravity effect, something like a Star Trek logo would show up in an opening... (I don't even know if any of these shows have that effect :P)
Or, the usual animation -- linear path between the thumbnail and the center of the screen.
Linear = more serious, more professional.
Both animations cost pretty much the same amount of bytes (about 20 more for the non-linear one..?)


Re: Media area (Aeva Media integration)
« Reply #15, on September 12th, 2013, 09:54 AM »
I'll give you guys a hint of that when I commit my code soon. What I'm looking for, is a rundown of whether I should add more options to the zoomedia setting pack (available to anyone creating an album), or remove options, or maybe move options to a collapsed "More options..." area (leaving only the 'crucial' ones visible), etc...