Thumbnails + 3gp videos

[Fred]

Hi
SPGM-Vid is great! I just have two small snags.

My site: www.sjursaether.no/rebecca/bilder/index.php

1. Thumbnails. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I cannot see thumbnails for my videos. I save images as _thb_image.jpg in the same folder as the videos, but to no success. The videos are saved as video.MP4, and are saved in the same folder. Is it because the video I've uploaded are in MP4 (see below) ?

2. TIP: Camera-phone videos. My Sony Ericsson K700i can do videos in a format known as 3gp. This is viewable in QuickTime, so I figured I would try this out. I used a piece of software called 3GP Converter to convert the videos into MP4 format and have then uploaded them to my site. So far so good. You should add this to your list of video-formats to show...I'm sure this would increase the usage of SPGM-Vid

best regards,
Fredrik

[jhollin1138]

@Fredrik:

As a father of two girls myself, let me say Rebecca is very cute.

First let's talk about the MP4 format.

I assume to get it to work you simply added "MP4" to the 'supportedVidExtensions' line as an available extension on the "spgm-vid.lib.php" file.  The line looked like this.

Code Select Expand

$cfg['global']['supportedVidExtensions']
= array('.asf', '.wmv', '.avi', '.mov', '.qt', '.rm', '.swf');    // supported video file extensions
The problem with doing this is some browsers might not support that video type.  For example, Firefox looks for a plug-in to play the video and doesn't find one even though a plug-in capable of playing that video may already be installed.  MP4 is one of those video types, so anyone visiting your site using Firefox cannot see the video.

Firefox can be modified to support that video type.  Although this fix would just be supported on the computer with the fix.  Meaning, someone without the fix running Firefox will still not be able to see the video.  (If you would like to know how to fix Firefox, I can post it here.)

I feel, until MP4 is correctly supported be Firefox it should not be added as a "standard" supported file type.

Now let's talk about your thumbnail problem.

I assume you were trying to have a thumbnail for each video.  To do this you need to name the thumbnails "_thb_<your video file name here>.jpg".

So for example, if you had a video named "FunnyVideo.mov" the correct name for the thumbnail would be "_thb_FunnyVideo.jpg" (Watch for the case sensitivity).  Put both the video and the thumbnail in the same folder.

[Fred]

Hi jhollin1138

- Rebecca. Thanks for that comment. We think she's the cutest ever! But then again...we would say that wouldn't we

MP4 format. Yes, this is exactly what I did to get it to work. I added 'MP4' to the end of that array. I was worried if this would create any trouble for me as I didn't really check to see if the array was used in some sort of array-count routine. But it looks to work ok.

The thing is...I don't have any other way of encoding my videos. My camera-phone does not come with an encoder software, but I can convert to divx avi's, but then again I'm faced with people not having the correct codecs installed.

What I'm saying is that I don't really care what format the videos end up in as long as people can see them without too much hassle. Now they only need to install quicktime and they're set. I didn't consider Firefox, nor any other operating systems besides Windows (I know..shame on me), but the majority of my visitors are family + friends who wouldn't use that anyway.

- Fred

[jhollin1138]

Hi jhollin1138

- Rebecca. Thanks for that comment. We think she's the cutest ever! But then again...we would say that wouldn't we

MP4 format. Yes, this is exactly what I did to get it to work. I added 'MP4' to the end of that array. I was worried if this would create any trouble for me as I didn't really check to see if the array was used in some sort of array-count routine. But it looks to work ok.

The thing is...I don't have any other way of encoding my videos. My camera-phone does not come with an encoder software, but I can convert to divx avi's, but then again I'm faced with people not having the correct codecs installed.

What I'm saying is that I don't really care what format the videos end up in as long as people can see them without too much hassle. Now they only need to install quicktime and they're set. I didn't consider Firefox, nor any other operating systems besides Windows (I know..shame on me), but the majority of my visitors are family + friends who wouldn't use that anyway.

Since you said you are running Windows, if you are running XP have you tried "Movie Maker"?  I am basically pretty lazy and since it was already installed, it is what I use.  You can edit, compress, add video effects and lots more.  It saves the video in "Windows Media Player" format.  Instead of installing Quicktime they will need to install "Windows Media Player."

By the way, adding an extension to extension is okay to do.  The number of extensions is not hard coded into SPGM-Vid.  The only thing that would give SPGM-Vid troubles if you tried to use more then one allowable extensions for the Thumbnails.  Only one extension can be used.

[Fred]

Great, thanks for that tip. I do have XP with Movie Maker...but haven't used it. I will give it a try.

Another thing (maybe this justifies a new topic?)
Not sure if this is because I installed without properly reading the instructions, but when I have the enableDropShadows = true (this is default) set in the spgm.conf file for the picture gallery (located in the gal folder) it messes up the table format on the index.php page. The reason being that the function spgm_DropShadowsBeginWrap(); in spgm-vid.lib.php adds another table into the html code. Is this happening only to me?

/spgm-vid.lib.php:

Code Select Expand


Line 112 // Setting up the thumbnail (if using one that is) and gallery link
Line 113 if ($bNeedDropShadows == true) {
Line 114      spgm_DropShadowsBeginWrap();
Line 115    }


To 'undo' this formatting I had to set the enableDropShadows to false for my pictures galleries, but this is not optimal since that infact takes away the drop-shadows on the thumbnails for my pictures.

/gal/spgm.conf:

Code Select Expand


Line 134 # toggle to display a drop shadow below thumbnails and pictures.
Line 135 # the shadow pictures are included from the CSS stylesheet of the flavor.
Line 136 # value must be true or false
Line 137 # if commented out, default value is true
Line 138 #
Line 139 $cfg['conf']['enableDropShadows'] = false;


[jhollin1138]

What version of SPGM and SPGM-Vid are running?

There was a bug in SPGM v1.4.3 that built the Shadow Table around the Thumbnail in the HTML link statement.  This caused IE not to allow you to click on a Thumbnail and take you to the gallery (Although this bug didn't show up in Firefox).  Since SPGM-Vid is just a modified version of the SPGM code, SPGM-Vid also had the bug.  This bug was fixed in SPGM v1.4.4 and SPGM-Vid v1.0.5.

Hopefully upgrading to the latest version of both fixes your problem.  If it doesn't solve your problem, can you provide me a link to an example of your problem?

[Fred]

I'm using spgm-1.4.4 and SPGM-Vid v1.0.5. This is the first installation so there was no update of a previous installation either.

It was fixed by setting the conf.enableDropShadows to false in the gal/spgm.conf file, but then there are no shadows on the gallery images.

I've set the conf.enableDropShadows to true (I commented out the setting in the gal/spgm.conf file, so it is now like when it was first installed) and you can see the effect on my site:
http://www.sjursaether.no/rebecca/bilder/index.php

But.....it's probably something I did during installation. I have an habit of rushing these things and then having to go back to clean things up for weeks

And anyway...I'm going to 'liven' up the index page a bit anyhow. Its kinda dull at the moment, and I was planning to add a blog or something so people could leave comments.

Thanks for all your help! It's greatly appreciated.

[jhollin1138]

Well that is odd.  That "bug" (yes it is a bug) never showed up in my test site or in my SPGM-Vid sample page.  After setting Emily's site to not display Thumbnails, there it is I have the bug.

I will fix this "bug" in my next release, I have an XHTML Strict Code issue to fix and a new feature I have been working on.  In the meantime, if you would like to fix the problem do the following.

Code Select Expand

#
#-----[ OPEN ]------------------------------------------------
#
spgm-vid.lib.php

#
#-----[ FIND ]------------------------------------------------
#
   if ($iPictureNumber > 0) {

#
#-----[ REPLACE, WITH ]-----------------------------------
#
   if ($iPictureNumber > 0 && $cfg['conf']['galleryIconType'] == GALICON_RANDOM) {
Thanks for reporting that bug.  If you have anymore problems, let me know.

Look for an update to SPGM-Vid soon.

Edit: This bug has been fixed in v1.0.6.