Does AJAX can help me there?

It has been a while since I published some screen grabs of some of my professional projects (you know the one you do to pay your mortgage).

In one year I probably built around 15 websites, most of them using my own CMS tool, dScribe.

The last one which I hope to release this week was (as usual) small at the start and big at the end. It’s a project between RTE (Irish television body) and the Department of Education to provide a look in the past on the Irish cultural changes through the archives.

So a lot of video and audio of course as you can see below. Of course everything done with dScribe and I used this project to implement some cool new features in the CMS tool and I will publish this new version soon on Developers.ie( version 2.1 exactly).

For the story I created in dScribe a new hierarchical media library where users can create their own folders hierarchy, add some properties to the folders and their images. So when I am on the first page of the RTE Archives, I display some kind of virtual folders, then on the second page the list of videos ( with some previews) and then on the last page the video itself.

I think it’s a good use of having all the content in one place in the database, and then having some code in the front end to read the data and display as I wish.

For the records, I also implemented some localisation in dScribe, so you can now write the content in two languages (in my case here as you can see below, Irish and English).


Now back to Ajax and Atlas! I started to play with the bits recently and I am not yet an expert so maybe my question has really no answer. When the user is on the last page of the project, I have here a still to represent what the video should be, then after a click I start to play the video. Is it possible with Ajax to pre fetch the video and buffer the stream. Because I imagine that in most scenarios, the user at this stage want to play the video.

I ask that because when you play a streamed video, you always have this gap between the click and the real start (buffering time obviously).

So at the moment I am displaying the video status bar but I wonder if something can be done with Ajax.

 

3 Comments

  • ::Is it possible with Ajax to pre fetch the

    ::video and buffer the stream.



    I do not think so. Or: the Video is basically some sort of Object in the page. Prefetch would be a manipulation of the object's INNER state. If the object has an API for this - then yes. If not: no. Ajax is simply primitive JavaScript on the client, so it is limited to what JavaScript can do.

  • I would consider using a Flash video player if at all possible. It can buffer in the background while showing the same frame. That may not be possible with your system.



    You could also just have the video hidden and jpg visible, and then when you hit play switch the visibilities.

  • AJAX cannot load your (streaming) video in background to have it loaded if you want to play it. What you can do (as Dylan wrote) is using a Flash plugin to load the video there.

Comments have been disabled for this content.