Massive Metavid Updates

September 18th, 2008

We have rolled out massive feature updates we have developed, the new skin and interface features developed in collaboration with the participatory culture foundation and Summer of code contributions by Stjepan Rajko. Simultaneously we are doing 1.0 release candidates for the metavid software packages: the complete metavidWiki mediaWiki extension and the stand alone html5 javascript embedding library mv_embed. This post summarizes the software updates, exciting development underway in collaboration with kaltura & wikimedia foundation and outlines the up-and-coming launch for metavid.

Existing developments with Kaltura and Wikimedia

Work is under way to write a ~simple reduced feature set~ smil like player & editor using firefox 3.1 html5 video support. Basic transitions using css animations and frame scrubbing/serving features have been completed… watch this space & kalturas blog for updates as development moves forward. As this development matures we should have an integrated sequencer on-par with kalturas flash based video editor but using ogg theora and accessible to Firefox users on free software platforms.

Metavid Launch Plan

We will be launching metavid over the next week or so. Watch this blog for updates As a community archive project users help in reporting any bugs they find with the site in #metavid on irc.freenode.net or emailing them in to the developers list

MediaWiki rc1 release notes:

Some minor known issues remain please send in bug reports as we move towards an official 1.0 release

Unified Search

• new unified search model groups and aggregates relevant semantic metadata per search
• advanced search improvements
• improved autocomplete suggestions/display

Stream Interface Enhancements

• new streamlined stream interface for easier clip editing and jumping around the stream
• improved transcript integration with video playback (scrolls transcript window while seeking and playing back content)

Improved Skinning Support

• improved skin infrastructure to support the skin created by the Participatory Culture Foundation

Mv_Embed (1.0.rc1)

• improved html5 -> current browsers/plugins support
• support multiple stream selection using html5 <source> tag or ROE media description xml, supports flash streams (Thanks to Summer of code Student *stjepan*)
• improved transcript scrolling, remote embedding without data proxy, metadata queries, and browser compatibility.
  
• improved video control skinning (should soon be possible to support multiple css based skins)
• developed php based flash media server added for serving segments of flvs to arbitrary clients.
  (based on FLV4PHP this lets you do server side media seeking similar to other php based falsh-media-servers except mvflvServer its compatible other playback clients like vlc and mplayer, works with flv files over 4 hours 39 min 37 seconds long and avoids sending the client keyframe metdata for quick streaming response)
• Also See Mv embed page

Massive security review (thanks to tstarling of wikimedia)

• properly escaped all values outputted to browser and database
• proper use of database wrapper functions
• closed some security holes (running older versions of metavidWiki is a bad idea please update now!)

Updated compatibility to JQuery 1.2.6

• updated to latest and greatest (faster, leaner etc)
• Also see jquery release notes
• started updating ui.jquery components

Updated compatibility to updated metavidWiki version 1.13

• Also see mediaWiki Release Notes

Updated Compatibility to updated Semantic MediaWiki 1.2+

• faster, lazy loading of all classes, better db structure, + lots more
• Also See Semantic MediaWiki release notes

Entry Filed under: development, future, mediaWiki