New version of iZAP Videos available for TESTING - with HTML5 video support!

I've just finished a major upgrade of the iZAP Videos plugin. Among a thorough rewrite and cleanup of the whole plugin code the most noticeable new feature is HTML5 video support replacing the on-server video Flash functionality.

One big hassle is that you would also need to migrate (converte) all your existing on-server videos from FLV to MP4 format. Instead of adding all the upgrade code into iZAP Videos itself I've created a separate "iZAP Videos HTML Migration" plugin that you would only need temporarily to update the on-server video entries.

As this upgrade is slightly complicated internally within the code I would like to ask for some feedback first before publishing the new version of iZAP Videos and the migration plugin here on the community site. If you have a little bit of time to spare and if you have a test installation ready (or can set up one quickly), I would be very happy if some of you would be able to provide a little help with testing. Only on a test installation, please NOT on your production sites yet (everything works for me but I would really get some feedback from others first before I say "Go!").

So, version 2.3.4 of iZAP Videos is available for testing at https://github.com/iionly/izap_videos and the accompanying iZAP Videos HTML5 Migration plugin at https://github.com/iionly/izap_videos_html5_migration. I hope the instructions I've written are enough to understand the workflow.

  • So, no feedback of any kind at all? Sad...

    I've made the new release of iZAP Videos at https://elgg.org/plugins/1913474/releases/2.3.4 and released the HTML5 migration plugin at https://elgg.org/plugins/2802341/releases/2.3.4.

  • I've already made quite a few tests and need to do some more...

    Generally it woks fine but I had some problems and have a few suggestions.

    Feedback hopefully today (USA time).

  • Here is my feedback.

    This is very good and necessary plugin. Usually it works OK (Chrome, FF, IE, Opera) on all the websites (Dailymotion.com, Vimeo.com, Youtube.com).

    However:

    1. Sometime the server does not respond, and I get error 500.

    2. In Youtube I found a few videos that behave very strange - I receive many red notifications. For example, please check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9CzJkxKKd0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcybIgUdUa0

    What is common to both sites is that their entire screen is a link to their website.

    3. Regarding API Key of Youtube - It works when the API Key has no "Restrictions". It does not work when I restricted to IP or HTTP referrers - maybe I made some mistake here.

    4. In the Video page - please consider to put all the list of option (Recently viewed videos, Recently commented videos, etc.) in a dropdown list.

    5. Lastly - it would be great if we can embed videos in blogs, pages, comments, etc. I know that HTMLawed blocks this feature, but we might have a workaround. I'll describe the idea in other discussion.

     

     

     

  • One more comment:

    When click on Video in Group you get the following notification

    Sorry. We could not find the page that you requested.

  • Thanks for the feedback. I rather expected some remarks about the upgrade/migration process as this is something really new (as the html5 video support is newly added). Nevertheless, it never hurts to know about bugs or other shortcomings.

    The group video page issue is probably new in version 2.3.4. I will have it fixed in the next release.

    Embedding videos in other posts is probably a feature to be added rather on medium to long term than on short terms. I hadn't even thought about it yet. It might have been possible back in the pre Elgg 1.8 days even but due to changes in the embed plugin (and possibly mainly due to htmlawed becoming more restrictive) it became non-functional (I remember that I removed some code but I don't remember if I removed it because it never worked in the first place or stopped working at some point). This kind of embedding is also slightly different from the embedding option that is still available. This option is working the other way round: by providing some embed (html) code you would add a video entry on the site where the video is hosted elsewhere. And providing some arbitrary html code for embedding a video is a problem as the code could also contain bad stuff. Without lessening the htmlawed rules this is sure to fail and lessening the rules is calling for problems. So, in the long run I might even completely remove the current embedding option as it just makes not much sense anymore nowadays.

    Youtube API key must be unrestricted. I might have to add some remarks about that in the readme. In the past there was a clear difference between a "server API key" and a "browser API key". The server API key always had no restrictions (as it's meant to never be shared with users anyway). Now they have unified the key creation for the different types but apparently haven't managed to update their docs accordingly. They seem to change their dev tools management pages a lot and it's an endless job trying to keep the docs up-to-date.

    Sidebar menu entries: let's see when I have to to play with it. Maybe a single dropdown menu is better. I will have to try it out.

    Is the 500 http error also occuring when trying to add a (off-server) video? Is it happening always for a specific video or is there no correlation between the video you want to add and the error occuring. The other issue with the red error messages showing up could be due to some videos being restricted (e.g. forbidden to be embedded on other sites). I never had the nerve to really look into this matter. Possibly, there are some errors submitted that might contain some useful info about what's going wrong and catching these errors would possibly prevent the confusing error messages to show up and show a single meaningful error message instead.