Floe Video Player Wordpress Plugin UI exploration

[Cheetham, Anastasia]

On 2013-01-24, at 4:10 PM, Colin Clark wrote:

> I imagine a workflow that goes something like this:
> 
> * A user has a video that they want to include in their WordPress blog/site
> * They use our plugin to either:
>   a) upload the file directly (like, say, if they made the movie themselves in iMovie)
>   b) point us to a video that's already on YouTube
> * If it's a YouTube video, our plugin checks Amara to see if there are already captions for it
> * If there aren't, or if the video is being uploaded by the user, it prompts them to caption it using Amara
> * There might be, if necessary, some "advanced options" where a user can choose to upload or link to a pre-authored caption file; but I suspect this isn't a typical use case
> 
> Does this seem about right?


This is close to – but not quite the same as – the workflow I was starting with in my head, so it's great that we're having this discussion. Some of my imaginings are a bit more expansive than yours, some less. 


Here's my thinking so far; Let's go over where I maybe thinking too much, and where I maybe thinking too little :-)

- I was planning to start with a slightly narrower slice of a plugin than we'll eventually want by focusing on our immediate goal of integrating the VideoPlayer into the IDI site. The idea would be that once we have that working, we can go ahead with the integration; after that, we can work toward adding other features that we'd like but that are not actually required yet for IDI site integration.

- Since a) the VideoPlayer does support many more formats than just YouTube, and b) Amara supports other formats in addition to YouTube, it seemed to make sense to me to allow users to embed other video formats. (In those cases, the user would have to tell us what the format is.)

- We do want to support videos uploaded to the WordPress instance, but given that we're starting with the IDI site – and we don't want to host videos on server with the site – I'm starting with videos served elsewhere. Eventually, the plugin would be updated to add support for uploaded videos.

- The VideoPlayer does not automatically check Amara for captions (yet). For the OER Commons integration, Cindy and Alex started a widget that would work with the VideoPlayer and do the querying (as well as redirect the user to Amara so that they can create captions). I realized that we should be integrating the functionality into the VideoPlayer, hence http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-4851
I believe I took a stab at starting the work back then, but didn't get far before I had to switch to other things.


I like the idea of encapsulating the option of uploaded captions in an "advanced options" section if we think it won't be a typical case.


-- 
Anastasia Cheetham     Inclusive Design Research Centre
acheetham at ocadu.ca           Inclusive Design Institute
                                        OCAD University