few questions on various subjects

rpsep2

hello,

- embedding video and audio

I know that you can embed video and audio using embed tags, but the players look terrible. Ive tried googling but there are numerous players which claim many things.
My question is, can anyone recommend a good player, which looks good and/or has styling capabilities, that can play all the usual video files (mainly mpeg, swf, mov and wmv), without requiring the user to install any crazy plugin (presuming they already have the usual quicktime etc installed)and similarly for a player for audio files. if this means having the player files in my site root that's fine (i presume it will?)

2 - lightbox
Ive got a php upload form which currently has its own page, but id like it to pop out in a lightbox style when you click the upload form link. How do i go about using a php page within lightbox or other similar scripts

I think thats it for now 🙂 if anyone has answers or opinions on any of these topics id appreciate it, thanks

m_tt

1) The best player I have used is JWPlayer. No doubt about it. It is not going to play WMV or Quicktime though. I wouldn't recommend using those formats for web streaming anyways.

See this link for supported audio/video formats:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/12539/supported-video-and-audio-formats

2) Perhaps you should look into using jQueryUI

http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/

Ashley_Sheridan

Also, just to point out, .swf is not a video file type, it's a Flash animation, perhaps you meant .flv which is a Flash Video file.

JWPlayer is definitely the best way to go though, it can be made to use videos in HTML5 (for non-Android smartphones) with Flash as a backup (for old versions of IE), however, you will need to supply it with several different versions of the video to play in different devices. There is no magic box solution that will play one format of video on all the main types of browser/devices.

dalecosp

#2 --- can you explain more fully? Lightbox is a client-side effect, produced by Javascript.

m_tt

Ashley Sheridan;11002137 wrote:
There is no magic box solution that will play one format of video on all the main types of browser/devices.

I don't necessarily agree with this 😉 Our mp4 video will play on every major browser (chrome, FF, IE 6/7/8/9, Safari) and with JWPlayer (HTML5) also on all iPad or iPhone

m_tt

dalecosp;11002165 wrote:
#2 --- can you explain more fully? Lightbox is a client-side effect, produced by Javascript.

Lightbox is made specifically for image galleries. I assume he only wants the popup/modal dialog effect so I recommended jQueryUI e.g.

http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/#modal-form

Ashley_Sheridan

m@tt;11002177 wrote:
I don't necessarily agree with this 😉 Our mp4 video will play on every major browser (chrome, FF, IE 6/7/8/9, Safari) and with JWPlayer (HTML5) also on all iPad or iPhone

I assume your mp4 video is using the H.264 codec? If so, this table shows what kind of support you will get:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Table

While it may play on Firefox for you, it's a Windows only thing, so you won't get support on Firefox for Mac or Linux, and I believe Firefox 3.6 and below never supported that codec (note that Fx3.6 is equivalent in age to somewhere in the middle of IE8 and IE9), Google Chrome is removing support for H264, and other popular browsers (such as Opera, Konqueror) don't support it.

vivek151189

You may use flowplayer also on behalf of Jwplayer

Weedpacket

m@tt wrote:
Lightbox is made specifically for image galleries. I assume he only wants the popup/modal dialog effect so I recommended jQueryUI

It looks like something that can be populated from an AJAX response might be good for this.

I did something similar a few years ago: when the login/register button was clicked, a popup was displayed that got its content from the same script that produced the in-page login. If the user chose to register, it would resize and repopulate itself with the registration form. Cancelling would just close the popup and they'd be back on the page they started from.

(If you didn't have JavaScript running the login button would just be a link to the login page. But then, for this site, if you didn't have JavaScript running there wouldn't have been much point logging in.)

Enough of the senile mumblings. If going the jQuery route, Fancybox might be suitable.

dalecosp

Here we are, rambling on (I'm more senile that you, old friend) ... and no comment from the OP?

Sounds to me like he just wants to show a form in a div with the rest of the screen blanked out. You set up a DIV with the form in it, set it to "display:none;" in the CSS with a high z-index, and have JS toggle this to "display:block". Have another DIV, sized 100+ percent, black, or with some opacity in the CSS, and also "display:none;" with the same functionality and a z-index one less than the other div; when the link is clicked it's also set "display:block". That's about all there is to it, besides a close icon which simply sets the display on both DIV's back to "none".

Or am I missing something?