TheDJ writes

I didn't think this was gonna be so hard to make a video NOT have native controls. And it's not, at least not for the majority of web developers. You have a nice controls attribute on the video tag. Add it, you have native controls, don't add it and you won't. The thing is however that many sites for many different reasons specify their own controls using Javascript. And I'd like to continue doing the same for Wikipedia. And here is my problem pictured above. I call it the 'Flash of Native Controls'. Something like this is extremely distracting for visitors of the webcontent. The solution seems simple. Just remove that controls attribute from your HTML. But I'd rather not do that.. And the reason is because at Wikipedia, we have many re-users of our generated HTML content. But most of those re-users don't use the same JS stack. Removing the controls attribute means they won't have videocontrols. I want controls, I just want MY controls...

As most people know, Wikipedia usually runs the bleeding edge code of MediaWiki. Currently new versions are deployed every 2 weeks. This is great, necessary and sometimes annoying for Wikipedians. There is a common complaint that MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's experimentation grounds. On the other hand MediaWiki is overly focused on Wikipedia. Without Wikipedia, I think that the default MediaWiki would look a lot more like Wikia than like Wikipedia. In my opinion, if MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's sandbox then it does so because the only sandbox that compares to Wikipedia is Wikipedia itself. There ARE no other viable experimentation grounds that compare to the distorted reality of Wikipedia. So how bleeding edge is bleeding edge? Code is deployed almost every 2 weeks, yet HTML5 has been the default for MediaWiki for over 3 years now , but has still not made it to Wikipedia for all sorts of compatibility reasons and accommodating to the volunteer tech community...

For the past few weeks, I have been fixing problems that I run into while testing some of the new video tools that Michael Dale has been developing for the Wikimedia Foundation. As with any new software, especially Javascript tools, there are plenty of issues and since I can find them, I might as well fix some of them, instead of throwing it all back at Michael. This week I ran into one particular annoying issue. For some reason the menu in the new mwEmbed mediaplayer ( Demo of the player ) was flickering under certain conditions on Safari. I created a video that demonstrates the problem. So I was looking trough the code of the player, trying to come up with a reason on why this would behave like this and why only in Safari. I spent a few hours tracking all the events, assuming that some event (like mouseover) for some reason was incorrectly telling the menu to hide itself. I was validated in this line of thought by observing that manipulating some of the Javascript events of th...

This week at SXSW (South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals), the Open Video Alliance presented a new campaign and portal for video on Wikipedia . The project is called "Let's get video on Wikipedia" and available at http://www.videoonwikipedia.org . The goal is to make it easier and more understandable how to upload video for usage in Wikipedia and is made possible by the Open Video Alliance , the Wikimedia Foundation , Kaltura , Miro and Mozilla Drumbeat . (Blog and press releases: Open Video Alliance , Miro , Wikimedia Foundation ) In some ways this project resembles a bit Wikiportrait , a project to help people upload their own portrait photo for usage in Wikipedia articles. Video On Wikipedia tells you what steps you need to take in order to create and upload a video for usage on Wikipedia. It also attempts to explain why uploading video for Wikipedia is different from uploading to most other places, a good bit of evangelism for Free and Open formats for ...

Michael Dale has been working hard on a new media player for the mediawiki projects. This media player is based on the HTML 5 <video> tag . You can compare it to the demo players of Youtube and Vimeo and DailyMotion . It should support Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3, Opera 10.5 and if you install the Xiph QuickTime components it works with Safari 4 for the Mac. If your browser doesn't support HTML5, the player will use the JAVA cortado player , like it does in the old version of the Ogg player. Recently both Apple and Firefox introduced Fullscreen support for the <video> tag in their development versions of the browsers, and these features can now be used with the new player for Wikimedia. The controls automatically show and hide, and you can even add and display subtitles with it. How do I test it ? It is rather easy, you go to this example video . If you want to enable it for all videos, you need to be registered on Wikimedia Commons or the English Wikipedia . You ...