Play button

[Jay dedman]

I just added a request to http://showinabox.pbwiki.com/Roadmap.

I'd like the option to have a PLAY button on a thumbnail when I use
VPIP/Video Wrangler.
this makes it more obvious that I should click to watch.

For instance on Milt's showcase page, its not at all clear which
thumbnail is a video and which is just a thumbnail.
http://showinabox.tv/2008/03/15/hollow-bone-films/

Jay

--
http://jaydedman.com
917 371 6790

[Dylan Richards]

Good thought. I hadn't really noticed the lack of play button on the
thumb until you brought it up. It's easy to miss things when you
become the "in the know."

~d

On Mar 15, 10:32 am, "Jay dedman" <jay.ded...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just added a request tohttp://showinabox.pbwiki.com/Roadmap.

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Should be straight forward to do.

(Warning: Tech talk below)

Either... could offer a filter on the image URL.  Or a filter on the HTML code that shows the filter.  (Or both.)

So, for example...

$href = apply_filters('videowrangler_videothumbnail_href', $href);

or

$markup = apply_filters('videowrangler_videothumbnail_markup', $markup);

(respectively).

The use one of these to put that play button on the thumbnail.  (You could do much much cooler things with these too.)


See ya

--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
http://ChangeLog.ca/

Motorsport Videos
http://TireBiterZ.com/

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[Adam Warner]

...thanks for posting that Charles...good knowledge to have:)

 

Adam W. Warner
http://wordpressmodder.org

 

[Milt Lee]

YES - I would love a play button. I always appreciate it - and it
makes things much easier for folks that don't know that this is how
you play a video. Many people have said to me that they had no idea
that you could just click the picture. I've always resisted have a
line of text that directs people to click the video, but frankly
that's just the designer part of me - and frankly - that part of me
doesn't always serve the site very well. I know that this is
something that many of us do.

So here's even another request - how about a skin-able player? This
is the thing that I used to love about Lo-Fi St. Louis - the look of
the TV set - it made it really clear that this is a film/video/tv
something that you should watch.

Actually even as I think about this - I'm coming up with a new design
for Hollow Bone. hmmmmm - very exciting.

Milt
Cell - (605) 381 4842
Office - (605) 341 4232
http://hollowbonefilms.com
http://manykites.com
http://oyate.com
http://jamielee.manykites.org

[Jay dedman]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux
<superc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Should be straight forward to do.
> (Warning: Tech talk below)
> Either... could offer a filter on the image URL. Or a filter on the HTML
> code that shows the filter. (Or both.)

Can we build it into Video Wrangler so its just a check box?
"want to add a Play Button to your thumbnail?"
or better,
"upload the PNG you want to use to represent te play button on your thumbnail."

Can I put this on the roadmap?

jay

[David Meade]

I did this once with yet another unreleased plug-in I
wrote/played-around-with for a while. It was ok, but it really slowed
down the page load time.

Normally a visitor to my site would cache the various poster images
(hosted) a blip and they'd load up really fast the next time they
stopped by.

But with this sort of modification, the php page itself loads all the
images from blip (or wherever) each and every time (so that it can
then do some magic to add a play button). Vistors might cache the
newly modified image but it wouldn't matter - the php filter would go
grab a new copy to modify on each page reload.

If such a plug-in is developed, I would recommend writing in a local
cache function or something in order to address this.

- Dave

--
http://www.DavidMeade.com

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Yup. Sounds like an excellent addition to the Roadmap.

See ya

--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
http://ChangeLog.ca/

Motorsport Videos
http://TireBiterZ.com/

Vlog Razor... Vlogging News... http://vlograzor.com/

[Jay dedman]

> I did this once with yet another unreleased plug-in I
> wrote/played-around-with for a while. It was ok, but it really slowed
> down the page load time.

just wondering.
why would that one image slow down the page since it's already loading
all kinds of images from your server?
is there something specific to a Play Button?

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jay dedman <jay.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I did this once with yet another unreleased plug-in I
> > wrote/played-around-with for a while. It was ok, but it really slowed
> > down the page load time.
>
> just wondering.
> why would that one image slow down the page since it's already loading
> all kinds of images from your server?
> is there something specific to a Play Button?

David:

I think I know what you problem was.

You need to send out the proper HTTP headers to get caching to happen
(and to avoid the slow down) with your PHP modified images.

Like, "Last-Modified" and "Etag". That way the browser will do a
conditional GET.

Also... you need to add code to handle the conditional GET.

These conditional GETs... or the lack of them... is what often makes
PHP generated things seem slow. Add them and you site is as snappy as
a site based on static files.

[David Meade]

well the problem wasn't happening in the browser ...

The browser (client) was caching everything just fine like it should
... but that didnt matter because the php page on the server was
(before it ever getting to the client) redownloading every image from
blip in order to add a play button (regardless as to if the client
browser would have or now).

so while all that image downloading normally happens on the client
browser - where caching can take place - I'd forced it to happen on
the server before the page was even offered to the client bowser.

Does that make sense? (This is at least how I came to understand the slow down).

- Dave

--
http://www.DavidMeade.com

[Milt Lee]

This idea of a conditional "GET" - I would love to know more about
that, and what it means. If it means my site would load faster - then
I want to know how to do it. Since starting a blog, and using dynamic
pages, I've always felt my pages were loading much slower than the old
static sites that I was building. I don't like it but it seemed like
that was a price that had to be paid. If you know how to speed up
loading - Charles - it would be really good to have a little tutorial
about that.

Adam - do you know about this? Have you ever written anything about it?
thanks everybody,

Milt

> You need to send out the proper HTTP headers to get caching to happen
> (and to avoid the slow down) with your PHP modified images.
>
> Like, "Last-Modified" and "Etag". That way the browser will do a
> conditional GET.
>
> Also... you need to add code to handle the conditional GET.
>
> These conditional GETs... or the lack of them... is what often makes
> PHP generated things seem slow. Add them and you site is as snappy as
> a site based on static files.
>
>
>
> See ya
>
> --
> Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
> http://ChangeLog.ca/
>
> Motorsport Videos
> http://TireBiterZ.com/
>
> Vlog Razor... Vlogging News... http://vlograzor.com/
>
>
>
> >
>

--

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Yeah... that makes sense.

To get around that, you could cache those images (on the Blip.tv
servers) on your server.

And check to see if they've been updated (on the Blip.tv servers)
every now and then. (Using conditional GETs).

That would fix the problem.

So... you should use conditional GETs in 2 places. When you download
images from the Blip.tv servers (to cache them on yours). And when
you server the "tweaked" image to the users.

--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
http://ChangeLog.ca/

Motorsport Videos
http://TireBiterZ.com/

Vlog Razor... Vlogging News... http://vlograzor.com/

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Hey Milt,

Yes, the idea of a conditional GET is to make your website load
faster. It does this by letting web browsers and web proxies cache
stuff.

But... I'm not sure if it would be useful to you to teach it to you.
You'd have to start coding in PHP (or something like that) if you
wanted to make use of that knowledge. But with WordPress (which is
coded in PHP), making use of conditional GETs can be "challenging".

One of the "challenges" with WordPress is that it isn't geared to use
conditional GET "properly" most of the time. It's not really geared
towards caching at all.

IMO, the whole plugin architecture, for WordPress, needs to be
redesigned with caching in mind.

Having said that... I'm using it where I can. But we could do alot
better (if WordPress was architectured differently.).

--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
http://ChangeLog.ca/

Motorsport Videos
http://TireBiterZ.com/

Vlog Razor... Vlogging News... http://vlograzor.com/

[David Meade]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 2:16 AM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux
<superc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> To get around that, you could cache those images (on the Blip.tv
> servers) on your server.

Yeah exactly. You'd want some sort of blog-server-local cache feature
written in to the image manipulation plug-in. That's what I did with
my episode archive (caches thumbnails on my server based off of poster
images at blip - and only grabs originals (at blip) if a local cached
version doesn't already exist)... I just never went back and added
such checks to the image manipulation thingy I'd made once upon a
time.

- Dave

--
http://www.DavidMeade.com

[Milt Lee]

Well then.....coding in PHP - uh......maybe in my next life. But I
really appreciate the cogent explanation. Perhaps it will come along
in a future iteration.

Thanks again,
Milt

--

[Sull]

you can also speed up your site by design.... minimalistic approach.
also, compressing css and javascript and/or doing inline code instead of external file references can speed things up.

[Jen Simmons]

One of the biggest culprits for slowing a site down is to not be careful about keeping every image as small as possible. Any image saved as a regular .jpg is way too big. I see a lot of people leave images in their huge form (like 800px wide), and then use old html to get the page to present the image smaller (like 250px wide) -- but that huger image is what has to load. 

A couple larger images on a page isn't a big deal. But when it's a whole bunch of images, including backgrounds and headers, and thumbnails that aren't really thumbnails and lots of pictures in the content -- it really adds up! 

I still push people (clients + students) to always optimize every image in a program like Photoshop (Save for Web) -- paying attention to make the files sizes as small as possible. And to always make the image the size you want it to be on the page, not bigger....

Jen

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Software could take care of that kind of thing.

(I.e., software could take care of resizing images to the proper sizes
for thumbnails.)

--
Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.
http://ChangeLog.ca/

Motorsport Videos
http://TireBiterZ.com/

Vlog Razor... Vlogging News... http://vlograzor.com/