Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Jul 27, 2015 12:28 pm

sctroyenne wrote:An update after trying the first page of my log across multiple devices (I don't have all stats readily handy right not but I can provide details if wanted):

On a new computer with decent to good hardware (though not a gaming PC) it works pretty well. Only slightly longer to load. Though I noticed that on a PC, the option to play in full screen is present in the embedded player but clicking on it doesn't work (don't know if that's a YouTube issue or forum issue). I have to view the video in YouTube directly to get full screen.

On an old computer (XP) with basic hardware it's a bit laggier to load but it still works with no crashes. By the time I scroll all the way down the page and go back up the all the pictures are loaded and the videos are ready to play.

On mobile (iPhone 4S, Safari, iOS 8.1.3) it's not performing very well at all. Took a while to load, was a big white space for a while, froze for a few seconds, automatically reloaded. It did eventually load (after maybe about 5 minutes) but someone who doesn't have the patience for all that would probably just close it.

I tried all these with minimum to no other tabs open and nothing much operating in the background. I may convert some or most of the videos to simple links to make it smoother again unless we get some other video display options sometime soon.


On an iPod running iOS 6.1.6 whose capacity is 6.4 GB and with 2.9 GB available, Safari could not retain your page referenced before by emk. Generally after 20 seconds Safari crashed. The one video I could catch, La Malinche, would not play.

On a Compac CQ5110F with an AMD Athlon 7550 dual-core processor and 2048 mb memory, running Linux Mint 17.0, Firefox 39.0 and 4 other tabs open, but nothing else running on the machine, there was a long delay opening the page. I closed it and tried again, and it loaded. I can play the videos, too.
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby steyyan » Sun Aug 02, 2015 1:13 pm

If it's already been mentioned, then I'm sorry.

One option would be having a "display video" button next to the Youtube link, similar to those on the opening posts on Reddit (or all videos if you're using the RES client scripts). That way, people could watch youtube videos on this forums without having to load all of them at once.
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby mrwarper » Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:04 am

This is all well and good, so just a comment on the technical side.

I browse the web with javascript off (which I only enable when really necessary), and no flash plugins.
From what I see, the way youtube videos are embedded currently is via a 'Flash animation' object which apparently needs both things to show videos. While the javascript issue is mostly a religious one since I can turn it on, Flash is being phased out on Android systems and devices, which I think is a huge hurdle.

Apparently the newly recommended way is to embed YouTube videos via an iframe, which lets every device try and play the HTML5 version of videos first, then fall back to Flash if it is available and HTML5 is not. It should work equally well without the need for JS nor Flash.

Anyway, it all boils down to taking the same simple BBcode

Code: Select all

[youtube]VideoID[/youtube]
(users need not learn something else) and generating

Code: Select all

<iframe width="420" height="315"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VideoID?param1=value[...]&param=value">
</iframe>
instead of the current <object...> code. Interesting parameters which can also be pre-set on the server side to prevent low-powered devices from halting to a crawl when loading a page with videos are

autoplay = 0 (The video will not play automatically when the player loads, which should be the default anyway)
controls = 2 (Player controls display, but the video does not load before the user initiates playback.)
loop = 0 (The video will play only once. It should be the default again.)
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby AlexTG » Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:25 am

Someone's submitted a pull request on github to add the "Advanced BBCode Box" plugin, which uses iframes, and will allow us to embed stuff from lots of other video sites as well. A problem I've just noticed is that the [youtube] bbcode used in that plugin expects a url rather than an id, which means all our current embedded videos will stop working :(...
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby rdearman » Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:07 pm

Could probability fix that with a sql update statement.
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:14 pm

rdearman wrote:Could probability fix that with a sql update statement.


or modify the BBCode so that it manages both.
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby rdearman » Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:17 pm

zenmonkey wrote:
rdearman wrote:Could probability fix that with a sql update statement.


or modify the BBCode so that it manages both.

Or that. 8-)
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Re: Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

Postby sctroyenne » Wed Sep 02, 2015 5:27 pm

On another phpBB board I frequent I noticed things like gifs get hidden by a clickable "show spoiler" function in case that helps.
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