16:9 Flow player support

[and]

Currently 16:9 videos are letter-boxed to 4:3 in the Flowplayer.

Investigate possibility of player conforming to native aspect ratio of video file.

[anna]

It doesn't sound like this has been looked into much for this milestone, so will bump it to the next in the interest of getting 4.1 out soon.

[and]

There's been a strong request for this so bumping to 4.2.

What do you folks think?

[and]

Not sure why that closed. Reopening.

[and]

Dimo/Mike? - how difficult is this?

[and]

Note - it may be that is the issue is not that the transcoder doesn't correctly transcode the video, but just that the player stretches it.

Thumbnails for example from 16:9 videos come out 16:9 as does the ogg transcode. I haven't fully investigated this but this is my suspicion.

This is a 16:19 you can use for further investigation.  http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/andrew/videos/RW-GSCFF.m4v/view

[mike]

16:9 is working now. You can test it on  http://testing.plumi.org/Members/clopy/videos/test-16-9/view

The transcoder now keeps the aspect ratio of the original file, and flowplayer does not stretch the video any more. I've kept the 4:3 aspect ratio that we had on flowplayer on the video view.

[and]

I can't load the test site to test this.

[markos]

Hi And,

testing.plumi.org is working here. Check on /etc/hosts if you have a similar entry

127.0.0.1 testing.plumi.org

which points testing.plumi.org to localhost, then it has to be removed. That entry is used if you install Plumi on your system...

Hope this helps

[and]

Is it possible to do this without adding it to /etc/hosts and change something on the other end? I might need to show other people who aren't as geeky ;)

[and]

I managed to load that page but no video appeared in the player.

Mike, the player should shift to a 16:9 size when it has a 16:9 video. I think it's better that 16:9 is the default size as the majority of new videos these days are 16:9

[anna]

Some testing notes.

1. The video player aspect ratio is 16:9 for all videos. Is it possible for the player to auto-detect the aspect ratio and display the player (or a different version of the player) in the correct aspect ratio? I realise that YouTube? etc. just have the player in 16:9 with sideways letterboxing for 4:3 videos, as we have here. But worth asking - is this possible?

2. The video player seems to auto buffer / load the video on page load. This should probably be changed. With YT, the video does not load until the tab or window is activated. This is one choice we could make, if this is possible to implement. Or, perhaps we could opt for not loading the video until the play button is clicked (which I think is what we used to have).

[anna]

Have been thinking about backwards-compatibility with Plumi sites with existing video archives encoded as 4:3.

If we re-transcode all videos to 16:9, and change the player to display 16:9, all videos on the Plumi site itself will display reasonably.

However - videos that have been already embedded on other sites - if these link to the re-transcoded videos, the 16:9 video will be displayed in a 4:3 player.

Would it then be the best option to link to new files in the new player, leaving a copy of 4:3 encoded videos on the server, so these embedded videos still display properly...?

[anna]

Also checking - if video files are re-transcoded - will auto-generated thumbs also be re-transcoded to 16:9?

We probably need to check around the site to make sure these images are displayed in the correct aspect ratio.

For example, in the "Other videos by this author" section on the video/view page, as well as in video listings, these images are displayed as 4:3.

This should ideally be corrected before releasing the final version of 4.3 to make sure this change doesn't introduce ugly design problems.

[anna]

The player on the front page is still displaying in 4:3 ratio.  http://testing.plumi.org/

Also, the thumbnail is not displayed correctly within the player on page load. You can see the thumb from the currently featured video is close to square, sitting within the player, not quite stretched to the edges. Possibly a couple of things to fix there to make it display nicely.

[anna]

Another issue I found with the player - though I am testing this on a not-very-common platform/browser combination.

When I click fullscreen, the player pops up to fill the browser window. However the video only plays back in the corner of the frame, not in fullscreen (black window elsewhere - see screenshot).

[anna]

Fullscreen video display error FourTenFox? Mac OS 10.4.11

[anna]

(Using Firefox fork "FourTenFox?" enabling later FF releases to run on PPC Macs - using Mac OS 10.4.11)

[anna]

Also encounter this fullscreen video problem on Safari 5.0.6 / Mac OS 10.4.11

[mike]

Hi Anna, I'll start answering comment by comment:

21: 1) It is possible, but it's better to have a consistent player size instead of changing it depending on the video. There are more aspects than 16:9 and 4:3 and things could break or seem ugly if the player size is changing. I think this is why youtube also has a standard player size.

2) I think the player only loads a few seconds for instant playback, but the video on testing is a bit small to test. I'll check with a bigger one.

22: Keeping both video sizes would increase our disk space needs a lot I think. What we can do though is change the video size inside the iframe so that if the video is 4:3 it'll just scale it down and not distort it.

23: Thumbs will be regenerated, but those images sizes were fixed sized. We'll update the code to make them 16:9 too.

24: Video should be 16:9 now.

25: I'm not seeing this on my setup. If we can reproduce it on a more common setup we'll have to file a bug with the mediaelementsjs people. But it could be related to an old video driver issue with modern browsers.

[dimo]

The fullscreen button issue is caused by a conflict between UniversalSubtitles? and MediaelEmentJS. We added some code that mitigates the problem. Try it out on testing.plumi.org

Unless there are any important problems remaining I think we should close this ticket. Resizing the other videos thumbnails to 16:9 has wider implications for all thumbnails in the site and I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway. Why should small thumbnail images maintain the aspect ratio of the original video? This wouldn't look well in a listing of videos with different aspect rations.

[anna]

The fullscreen button issue seems to be resolved.

We can leave the issue of the thumbnail aspect ratio until the re-design.