CUNY Academic Commons

I'll get on this when I get home from class this afternoon.

This is weird. It looks as if the very first iteration of my shortcode was committed to the repo for release. I remember writing the code that's currently in the 1.4.6 release and therefore live on the site now. But I also updated this code to expand it so that it uses html5 video first and then falls back on flash when it's not available.

Let me keep digging, I'll find out where that code went and then we can discuss how to get it back into production ASAP.

Michael,

I'm so sorry, this is totally my fault. I had a git issue keeping me from merging things properly and in the fix some cac-livestream code (the latest code) was left out of the 1.4.6 release.

Boone,

It looks like my cherry picking wasn't as successful as I thought. I can see the different versions by checking out 1.4.x and then master in my local env and just checking visually what changes were made. I think I missed one commit when cherry picking.

How would you like me to handle this? The plugin is so simple I can just copy the code in Sublime while on master and past it into the plugin file after switching back to 1.4.x. It looks like this functionality won't be available to Michael until 1.4.7, unless we make a 1.4.6.1 release with cac-livestream just for him.

Michael,

As far as documentation goes, you can always look back at issue #2002 where you and I discussed how to use it. However, I can write up a readme file that will go into the next release so you can refer to it on Github as we move forward. If you'd like me to do this just let me know and i'll take the info from issue #2002 and reformat it into a more formal set of docs/instructions.

Thanks Dom, looking forward to testing it next week. And I can work on coalescing some documentation for the shortcode. Is there a reason though why I still get a 404 error when following the Github link?

I'm not sure why you're seeing the 404. I can see the plugin in the 1.4.x branch on Github just fine. Try this link:

https://github.com/castiron/cac/tree/1.4.x/wp-content/plugins/cac-livestream

As far as docs go. I should have no prob summarizing the use of the shortcode,

What would be great from your end is some docs about using the shortcode from the other side. What I mean is, what does a user need to do on their AWS and with their specific videos to make sure that the plugin can communicate with the servers that actually hold and stream the video. I'm not sure how that part works.

The cac-livestream repo is private, which is why Michael's getting a 404. Is there any reason not to make it public?

cac-livestream does not have it's own repo like cac-featured-content or cac-twitter-stream. It is a plugin that's just for us on The Commons right now.

So the link Michael is trying to use to view the cac-livestream code is in the castiron repo.

Ah yes, you're right. Do you want a cuny-academic-commons/cac-livestream repo?

I guess we might as well. I assumed that this plugin was going to be used by only us to enable streaming on our site for right now.

But the plugin doesn't contain any specific commons code, so it's own repo will allow us to distribute if we so choose to in the future.

I'll push it to it's own repo for now, but I don't think we should advertise it or publish to the WP plugin repo just yet. There are lingering concerns about the licensing of jwplayer (commercial vs non-commercial) that need to be discussed before public distribution.

Sounds good. Thanks, Dom.

Do I have rights to create repos for the cuny-academic-commons Github account?

If so I will create the repo so you don't have to bother with it.

I don't think you do, so I created it: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac-livestream

cac-livestream code has been pushed to it's new repo:

https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac-livestream

Michael, we should be able to collaborate on docs now. :-)

I started the README with basic usage instruction on Github:

https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac-livestream

Michael, we'll talk about getting some specifics together about how you connect the plugin to your AWS account after you've confirmed it works after the 1.4.7 release next week.

I'm leaving this open in 1.4.8 for now.

Hi Dom,

I'm going to set aside more time this week to play with custom settings, but it does work! I was able to view my stream on the http://live.gc.commons.cuny.edu site.

I update with more soon.

Sounds good, just wanted to make sure the latest code did what it's supposed to.

Don't feel like your slowing me down, I'm caught right in the middle of midterms right now. So whenever you get around to it, I'll be here. :-)

Modifying the image attribute in the [livestream] shortcode seems to break the player for some reason. I added this:

image="http://live.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2012/11/CUNY-is-live-player-800-500.jpg"

to the shortcode. The image appears in the player, but when you click play it doesn't work.

Ok after even more testing, it's seems to be more specifically that if I place the image attribute after a return within the shortcode the player will break. If I place the image attribute after a space the player still works.

I don't know what that's about.

Michael,

I finally had a chance to get back to this ticket tonight. Most of the functionality appears to be OK. I can input the shortcode as a single line or with line breaks and it loads an mp4file="" video. I obviously can't test the livestreaming functionality without a stream up and running on your server. Let me know if you've got some time to put into this so we can get it running the way its supposed to, and I can fix anything that's currently broken.

Sure, but I'm putting it behind the WooThemes and group invites issues I just updated. They seem a little more pressing.

Michael,

Can you give me a quick refresher on the state of your live streaming on/through the commons? Are you still using this plugin? Do you want to keep using this plugin? Have things changed substantially enough to warrant the creation of a new plugin maybe? Let me know and we'll get this ticket outa here and take care of whatever needs to be taken care of.

That prioritization makes sense, Dom - thanks.

FYI, Michael wasn't a watcher on this ticket, so he likely missed your call-out to him. He's listed now -- so, Michael, please let us know what you think when you have a chance. Thanks!

Hi Dom & Matt,

There is not a lot of live streaming on the Commons, though Phil Roncoroni at QCC just asked to stream something for 3/19. The site still uses the plugin, and if I recall correctly the issue was one in which if you add returns rather than spaces between attributes (as suggested in the example https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac-livestream), it breaks.

Also, if someone downloads the zip from Github, they have to rename the directory 'cac-livestream' from 'cac-livestream-master' otherwise the PHP named path to the jwplayer.js and player.swf files is broken.

Let me know if you want to set up a test at some point.

- Michael

Thanks, Michael. I just forwarded a message to you about someone else interested in this.

I know have a credit card I can use, and I feel strongly that the livestreaming solution should not be under your name/cc. Also happy to spend some funding on this if a more robust solution would help. I still would like the Commons to offer livestreaming. Should we consider other livestreaming solutions?

I'll revisit the plugin code/structure and see where the small issues we've been experiencing are coming from. Fixing that naming issue with getting the code from Github also shouldn't be hard.

Michael, as soon as I've gone over the code again, I'll ping you about setting up some tests to see where we are and what we're missing.

Dom -

Great. Let me know when you're ready.

Matt -

To get started, you can create an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. I would then be able to use the EC2 console and start a Wowza embedded license virtual server that can be turned on and off. That's what I'm doing which is ~$10 a month, plus an elastic IP ~$2 a month. After that you pay only a $.15/hr to when the server instance is active.

We can look to continue to develop and get the stats everyone I know wants. This would call for some things that are beyond me, like SSH into the server and setting up configs to get that data as well as other customizations.

And I bet there's some insight to be learned from Luke and Mikhail with VOCAT 3.0 which is built on AWS (not streaming just video conversion and hosting). They're using their elastic transcoder to take any flavor of video and convert/host on AWS. Sadly the tool can't do livestreaming yet as there is no HTML5 standard for live video calls. But they think it will come at some point.

I know they created VOCAT specifically for analysis of student speeches, but effectively it's a video social network tool with sophisticated commenting and attribution features. Who knows, it might be interesting for other communities with different interests at some point.

Great -- just created an AWS account. Will send details via email. Thanks, Michael.