The Signpost

Technology report

Improved video support imminent and Wikidata.org live

TimedMediaHandler coming this week

A 2011 video featuring Jimmy Wales. Depending on when you read this, you'll either see the old video player or the new one, instantly recognisable by way of the large play button in the middle of the video.

The TimedMediaHandler extension (TMH), which brings dramatic improvements to MediaWiki's video handling capabilities, will go live to the English Wikipedia this week following a long and turbulent development, WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier announced on Monday (and later clarified).

The extension, which has been under development for the best part of two years, will introduce a new interface with subtitle support and a simple "|start=2.3|end=5" syntax for extracting video segments. Other features listed include "multi-format multi-bitrate transcoding with auto source selection, ... gallery and search pop-up players, viral iframe sharing / embedding, etc." although it is unclear how many of these will be available at launch. Deployments to other wikis and Commons have been pencilled in for the coming fortnight.

Readers with longer memories will note that some of these features have already surfaced in the 2009-released mwEmbed gadget, the development of which preceded work on TimedMediaHandler. The two have in common a number of features, most notably their choice of default interface – "Kaltura" video player, which was developed starting in January 2008 with assistance from the for-profit company of the same name and demoed at Wikimania 2009 (see contemporary Signpost coverage). The development path since mwEmbed has focussed on performance, security and code review concerns. Accompanying work has focussed on serving video more efficiently and it is likely that any TMH deployment will also make the possibility of accepting a larger number of video input formats a more attractive option to Wikimedia decision makers.

The deployment, should it go according to plan, is likely to be warmly welcomed by developers and readers alike. Among more seasoned developers, however, the smiles will surely be borne less from joy and more from relief that a project spanning four-and-a-half years of legal concerns, technical debates over code quality, endless technical delays and an uncertain payment structure has finally come to fruition.

In brief

Signpost poll
Wikivoyage
The Wikivoyage migration: the priority is that... (a) ...we migrate it perfectly (32%); (b) ...we migrate it quickly (19%); (c) ...we migrate it in the timescale and with the quality we said we would (41%); (d) other (8%)
You can now give your opinion on next week's poll: In my opinion, videos are...?

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.


















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