Some history:

• Audio / Video support in Core
• WordPress 3.6 + Audio/Video

I wanted to do a Make post on my wants for Audio / Video in 3.9 to solicit feedback and spark some discussion about what the community wants / needs / doesn’t want / doesn’t need. Adding audio / video in 3.6 was a great first step, but there are some things we can do to continue to modernize Media and give our huge user base even more ways to display and manage their content. We can also make some changes that help developers navigate the new world of MediaElement.js, Backbone, and Underscore.

First Things First: New Icons

#26650 Replace media file type icons with Dashicons

There are some lingering icons in the adminadmin (and super admin) that don’t look as pretty as their MP6ify’d brethren

Document the “new” Media code introduced in 3.5

In 3.5, we overhauled Media. @Koop produced some beautiful code, and a LOT of it. Raise your hand if you’ve ever dived in and tried to program against it? Raise you hand if you understand how all of it works? Me neither. As a community, we need to help each other learn what it is and what it does. Documentation will go a long way in getting us all on the same page. Do we have a documentation standard for JSJS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors.? We need one. While this isn’t the easiest place to start, it is a necessary one. I would be happy to spend time on this, as I have spent many hours recently reading the code and learning how it works. The main files: media-editor.js, media-views.js, media-models.js

Support subtitles for Video

#26628 Use the content of a video shortcode when provided.

This ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. speaks for itself, and already has a patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing..

Generate audio/video metadata on-demand

#26825 Add ability to generate metadata for audio / video files on-demand

Add “Playlist” and “Video Playlist” shortcodes

#26631 Add a “playlist” shortcode

Adding inline players for audio and video was a great first step. How do I add music to my site? Just upload an MP3 and drop the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org on a line by itself. Done. Or use the audio shortcodeShortcode A shortcode is a placeholder used within a WordPress post, page, or widget to insert a form or function generated by a plugin in a specific location on your site.. This works most of the time, but can be a little clunky if you want to share an album of your tunes. MediaElement doesn’t “support” playlists out of the box, but MediaElement is JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/., and with JavaScript and little UIUI User interface elbow grease, we can EASILY support playlists.

My ticket already contains a patch, but is still considered a work in progress. I think the playlist shortcode should produce markup that does the following:

• Works out of the box with any existing theme: the HTMLHTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. should be semi-bulletproof. Many of the Player libraries make heavy use of DIVs instead of items that might be overridden easily with CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets.: LIs and the like.
• Gives the developer total control if they want to write their own implementation
• Exposes enough data to the page so the themer/dev can make their own decision regarding display of album cover, track metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress., captions, etc.

My current implementation drops data onto the page for each playlist inline. A wrapper div “.wp-playlist” will have a script tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.) in it with type=”application/jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML.”. I do this so that if ‘wp-playlist.js’ is unenqueue’d, the developer still has the data necessary to write their own implementation. The data is reachable in JS like so:

var data = $.parseJSON( el.find('script').html() );

My current UI for playlist is a basic one, and uses Backbone Views to render the tracklist on load and update the “current” playing track view. There are 2 camps of people when it comes to “JS on the frontend” – one who doesn’t like it (others) and one who says “who cares” (me). One of the reasons I am posting this at the beginning is so we can flesh out issues like this.

Abstract Gallery logic into “Collection” logic that Galleries, Playlists, etc can use with minimal registration code

I have already done a first pass at this in the playlist shortcode patch. It goes like this: a “gallery” is really a “collection” of attachments of type “image.” A “playlist” is really a “collection” of attachments of type “audio.” So they should extend or be instances of a “collection”-type class. Currently, the Gallery code has to be dupe’d. By abstracting this code, Gallery, Playlist, Video Playlist, + any other “collection” of media type can be registered minimally.

Other Ideas

• In our playlist JS code, emit events that others can hook into – maybe a video playlist is: News clip, ad, news clip, ad, etc. When emitting events before / after an ad, the dev could disable next/prev buttons
• Make a playlist embeddable on other sites via an iframeiframe iFrame is an acronym for an inline frame. An iFrame is used inside a webpage to load another HTML document and render it. This HTML document may also contain JavaScript and/or CSS which is loaded at the time when iframe tag is parsed by the user’s browser. or embedded markup
• Register an endpoint for audio / video that will expose the “embed code” via oEmbed

Thoughts?

#audio, #backbone, #jquery, #media, #mediaelement, #underscore, #video