changes and plugin revelations
Warren Murray
Hi showinaboxers,
I did put this on the forum but thought I would implement MAXIMUM DEMOCRACY!!! by posting it to the Google Group as well.I have made quite a few changes to how I'm doing Garage Night TV, http://www.garagenight.tv
The site is a Wordpress/K2 combo.
Up until recently I was using vPiP, almost exclusively because of the facility for sidebar thumbnails of recent videos. But I did not entirely like the way it did this, and other things, including the way the player looked in my Feedburner feed and alert emails. So while I say thank-you for the hard work people have put into vPiP, and the fact that it's got Garage Night this far, it was time for a change.
Also, I wanted to get iPhone compatible videos presented automatically to iPhone users.
What I have settled on is the following combination:
* blip.tv player
* WPtouch iPhone Theme, and in conjunction with this ...
* Blip.It iPhone Handler
* Recent Posts plugin (with Post-Plugin Library)
* NOT USING blip.tv's 'magic iphone embed' feature
The first one we all know, and the second and third one many of us would know - it is based on calling up the m4v version that Blip can automatically create and presenting it to iPhones.
I know that blip is now offering its 'magic iphone embeds' to achieve iPhone playback, but this didn't suit me. The beauty I have found of using the Blip.It iPhone Handler is that you can edit the php script of the plugin to replace the .m4v file extension with another iPhone-compatible file extension of your choice. In my case I send a .mov file to iPhones that is encoded according to my liking. You could make this an .m4v or an .mp4 or anything else the iPhone will play, and you can change it later if you want - whereas once you have uploaded a file in multiple formats to Blip you can't change the roles, and the roles are what determine which file is used by the 'magic iPhone player'.
How the BlipIt iphone handler works is by going through the source code for your video's page at Blip and picking out the URL of your iPhone-playable vid, according to the .m4v extension or whatever you have changed it to in the php file. It then embeds that video on iPhones.
The Recent Posts plugin is a special little piece of magic. It lets you display your recent posts as a sidebar widget and is hugely configurable.
So to replace the vPiP recent videos, I have added a custom field called 'thumbnail' to every one of our episodes. The 'thumbnail' field contains the URL of the thumbnail image. You can then edit the options for Recent Posts to call in whatever fields of a post you want, including custom fields, and add HTML to get it all displayed how you want.
In this case I've got my thumbnail and the post title, all wrapped in the post URL, so I've got neat clickable thumbnails with the post title beside them, also clickable. The way I have done it, ALL thumbnails for ALL episodes appear on ALL pages and posts at the site, which is what I want. Look at the "Other episodes" section in my sidebar to see how it works.
Here's where you can get the stuff I've mentioned:
WPTouch and Blip.It for iPhone: http://www.bravenewcode.com/
Recent Posts and Post-Plugin Library: http://rmarsh.com/plugins/recent-posts/
All the best, and hope this helps someone.
Waz
http://www.garagenight.tv
Cheryl Colan
We initially tried to avoid people having to use custom fields for thumbnails, but in my re-design I'll be going that way, too, so I can make use of the flexibility of the Recent Posts plugin.
I'm still looking at the Podcasting plugin for my playback solution because it uses the JW player and allows me to add whatever options I want for the player. But I'm hoping for some additional features to be added - been corresponding with the plugin author.
Anyway, thanks. I missed your forum post initially, so I appreciate your email to the google group.
Cheryl