bvault-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Beer <chris_beer@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

The current iteration of bVault directly supports only a javascript-wrapped
quicktime player. Part of the initial thinking was this should make it
easier to rapidly develop a working prototype and allow us to evaluate the
landscape. Since that initial planning stage, a couple new use cases and
technology has come along.

Many videos have rights restrictions that limit delivery to streaming-only.
The Quicktime experience, while functional, can be less than ideal (although
Quicktime X may change this?)

There is some interest in embedding video outside a bvault environment
(either in an external annotation environment, an authoring system, etc),
for which Quicktime may be less suited (although almost certainly better
than an opaque Flash-based system).

The nascent HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags are "of the web", which may make
these actions easier (or at least more standards compliant). Unfortunately,
browser support at this time is lacking,  coupled with the current codec
mess, makes full reliance on these tags next to impossible. There was some
recent work <http://code.google.com/p/video4all/> using some browser
technology to replace <video> tags in the DOM with an appropriate embedded
flash player. I've done some preliminary investigation of this technique, as
well as exploring the potential for integrating the HTML5 media API with
existing players (in this case, the Flash-based Flowplayer) with some
success.

The relatively pluggable architecture of bvault should make it possible to
replace the existing wgbh-video view script with new player alternatives.
Perhaps the next step here is to standardize the video API -- I'd propose
investigating the HTML5 standard (which seems to work quite well on
Webkit/Gecko browsers; I'll need to explore __getter__ and __setter__
support in IE). This would allow any video plugin that supports HTML5 (or,
with some javascript voodoo) to be dropped in as a replacement player

To help bootstrap this process (and provide some necessary functionality) in
staging@r506, I've added a <video> based noscript alternative to allow for
some easy DOM scraping by some institutions.

Chris