Video Player: tasty carrot component

[Colin Clark]

Hey all,

A few months ago, we built a really nice HTML 5-compatible Video  
Player component with Infusion, which we now use on the Fluid Engage  
web site and for our component screen casts. Video Player supports  
multiple HTML 5 video formats, pure HTML captions, and accessible  
controller, and seamless graceful degradation to YouTube or other  
video sources.

The source code is currently located in the incubator:

http://source.fluidproject.org/svn/incubator/videoPlayer/

With a bit of tweaking and polish, the Video Player looks like it's  
close to being ready for inclusion in the next release of Infusion.  
The only blocker issue we know about so far is that its unit test  
coverage is a little thin--a primary requirement for any component in  
the product.

I'm thinking the Video Player is a nice "carrot component"--a decently- 
scoped project for someone who wants to get involved in the community  
or is looking for a break from other work. I'd be happy to help mentor  
and assist someone who wants to dive in to anything from bug fixes to  
new features.

Here are few of the interesting next steps for Video Player:

  * Out of the box themes or skins, providing different locations/ 
styles for captions and the controller
  * An optional "poster" effect that shows a still image before the  
user actually starts playing the video
  * A parser for YouTube-formatted captions
  * Media renderers for Quicktime and other common video players
  * Improved styling of the video controller to scale better with  
different video sizes
  * Alternative graceful degradation schemes, enabling users to even  
control Flash or Quicktime movies and display captions using pure  
HTML. This would be a good test of the new IoC features due in  
Infusion 1.2

I've filed JIRAs for many of these issues and a few others:

http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&mode=hide&pid=10001&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=priority&resolution=-1&component=10143

Colin

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Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org