Ray's dashboard

Hey Nathan,

That looks pretty neat. So the code I put together is generating the lists that appear beneath the video player?

Here are my thoughts, just as a friendly critique.

1. When you select a meeting from the drop down, maybe there should be a notice above/below the add telling the viewer they will soon be able to select a meeting to view.

2. When the text changes size due to the rollover effect on the episode selection, it causes all the other items to jump around and jitter making it harder to read. The highlighting and color change is good, maybe just keeping the text the same size might make it look a bit cleaner.

3. When you click on a show, can you make the video start playing right away? Just makes it a bit more intuitive if you click on a show, and its starts playing right away, instead of just loading the player and then having to start the video playing manually.

We are in the process of redesigning our site now, its really neat to see what other stations are doing.

Thanks

-ray

William,

Are you asking how to add google analytics into the cablecast public site?

-ray`

Filling in only blank fields would work great. A more complicated feature would also to 'modify all' shows when making changes to a projects default field. For instance if I decided i wanted to change the category of a series, I could just change it in the project, and it would apply the changes to all shows in that project. – Ray, on August 05, 2009 17:12

Filling in only blank fields would work great. A more complicated feature would also to 'modify all' shows when making changes to a projects default field. For instance if I decided i wanted to change the category of a series, I could just change it in the project, and it would apply the changes to all shows in that project. – Ray, on August 05, 2009 17:12

hahaha – Ray, on July 31, 2009 17:00

Hey Nathan,

Just seeing how its going for you. I thought this was a pretty cool little project. You've kinda kick started me on making a more usable interface to 'series' of shows.

Been planning on doing it for a while, but now I have some direction.

-ray

Hey Shawn,

Just checking in to see how your geeks are making out?

Just a FYI.... I'm planning on migrating all my sloppy PHP Cablecast code to return JSON instead of html and plain text.

I feel this will be more consistent, and allow other website developers to use the PHP files to get data that they can format themselves without having to modify the PHP code directly.

I imagine I will have it done in two weeks, its part of a larger project that I'm working on for my own tv station.

-ray

Hey Shawn...

I pulled out those two scripts and added them to the cablecast-php repository I have hosted on github.

www.github.com/raytiley

The two scripts are called upnext.php and nowplaying.php

They both get configured at the top with cablecasts server base path, and the channel ID. You can just copy and paste the php code into where you want the data inserted. In word press you'll need the php-exec plugin as mentioned above.

The nowplaying just returns the title of the currently playing show.

The upnext returns a html table. with each row containing a single cell with time - showtitle. The time is in bold I think.

Both scripts require the nusoap library which is also available on my github repository.

Let me know if I can do anything else....

-ray

Just wanted to let everyone know that we got this working.

You can see a demo at:

www.ctn5.org/raytest/mmsvod/

Hey Nathan,

Your using drupal right? You could use the google analytics module. You would need to setup an account first. But this lets you track links, which would include any time someone clicked on a VOD link or the watch live link.

There also probably some server logs you could view, but the data wouldn't be as pretty :)

-ray

So this is going to be kinda of a hack around what you want to do. As its been mentioned in other threads, Carousel presently doesn't support this capability natively.

However, Carousel can schedule RSS feeds, and the output of your zones are available as RSS feeds. So here is what I would try doing, although I don't know if it will work.

Create a new zone with bulletins you want to schedule. Don't add it to a channel layout (This is the part that I'm unsure of. Hopefully a TRMS'r will chime in. I think that a zone should still render bulletins even if its not placed in a channel layout)

Take the RSS feed of that zone and make a new alert bulletin to run when you want to switch cablecast to Carousel.

You'lll have to make an alert RSS bulletin for every time you want the slides shown, but at least you won't have to schedule every slide individually, just the RSS feed.

Here is a post I did on how to subscribe to a zones RSS feed. The same should work, just do it as an alert bulletin.

http://getsatisfaction.com/trms/topic...

Hope it helps

-ray

Alright....

Here is the deal. The JW player that will play WMV files such as the ones on your TRMS products runs on Silverlight. Silverlight as we know is a microsoft product.. which means its prone to failure.

Silverlight needs the Windows Media Server (your TRMS VOD server) to have http control protocols enabled, this has to be on a port other than 80 I think. It would also require changing the URL that the webservice serves out to reflect that control port.

An easier option I think would to just make the VOD file directory accessible over http.

You would also need to change the vod url from beginning with "mms:" to beginning with "http:"

Hopefully John will chime in with nice screen shots on how to do those two things, as I don't have a VOD server to play with.

Once those two things are accomplished. The player on this page should work:

http://www.ctn5.org/raytest/mmsvod/in...

Once its working, let me know and I'll clean up the code and tell you how to configure it.

-ray

Hey Nathan...

Can you give me a link to your wsdl file. Or just point me to your Cablecast server. I don't have the VOD server, so obviously its a little hard for me to test :)

Oh and some project IDs that you would like to base your playlists off of would be great too.

-ray

Ok. Now I'm here!!!

So Nathan, its definitely possible to build an xml playlist by modifying the code in my other post. I'll take a look at JW players documentation and get back to you. I'm getting married in 10 days, so I wouldn't hold your breath on this one, but after the 25th feel free to poke me along.

I'll just tell you kinda what i'm working on as well. I am currently using JW player, and i feel it works great. I really like the idea of putting 'adds' or psas into our online content. I however don't like paying licensing fees... so I am actually switching my system over to flowplayer. I found that flowplayer was a lot easier to do the stuff I wanted with simple javascripting then JW player. Maybe they just have better documentation.. who knows.

Here is an example of what I'm developing for my station:

http://www.ctn5.org/raytest/flowplaye...

This has the forced preroll add. I could also do a midroll or postroll add very easily.

The current file currently cant jump (haven't injected the meta data) but I've tested it and it does work on other files.

The pop up that shows was put there to let me test google analytics integration. So whats really nice is I have very accurate meta data of how often these videos are being watched, how much of the programs they are watching, and what points in meetings people are jumping to most often.

Keep in mind though that I'm not using TRMS VOD server. This is all a homebrewed solution.

Probably not for the faint of heart to develop, but I really like the control and flexability I have.

This is definitely where PEG is headed I think. In the past six weeks we have delivered 3700 VOD shows. Thats an average of 88 show views a day. Definitely not youtube, but still pretty impressive given its very local, usually not that exciting content.

-ray

XML playlist hmmm....

Are you trying to generate a play list for a embeddable flash player?

Anything is possible really.

-ray

Forget about windozzzz... Will my TRMS products run on google chrome?

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/0...

-ray

Sarah,

Also try defragging your E: (Content) drive. If your files get to fragmented, it can cause stuttered playback.

There was a post from chad about it here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/trms/topic...

-ray