Now that the blog/wiki mashup era has begun, it’s time to extend those technologies. Ever since I began using wikis, and MediaWiki specifically, I thought “that’s cool, an instantly editable page”. However, it wasn’t a media-rich technology. Inline images were about the extent of the multimedia offerings. Then, back in January, I discovered the YouTube Extension which offered a way to place YouTube (or Google) videos inline in a wiki page. That, of course, got me thinking that it must be possible to do it with any Flash Video file (FLVs). Poking around at the MediaWiki third-party extension page turned up this extension for a DreamHost Flash Player. Dreamhost has created a player that will allow its customers to embed streaming audio/video onto their web pages. This information pushed me closer to the Holy Grail. Thinking about how the existing pieces worked led me to see that it was doable in MediaWiki. The key to all this is some javascript that detects Flash and embeds Flash objects. Bobby van der Sluis has come up with a script called Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) that makes the embedding possible. The last piece of this puzzle is a Flash player, and there aren’t many better than Jeroen Wijering’s Flash Video Player.
So the simple ingredients are:
Flashplayer.swf – This is what plays the embedded FLV
ufo.js – This is the javascript that assists in the embed process
dhflashplayer.php – The MediaWiki extension (gets place in the “extension” directory)
The LocalSettings.php then gets modified to point to the dhflashplayer extension and that’s it. Now you use some special code to embed your video in MediaWiki. Something like this:
You can see the demo and view some more detailed instructions on the new UMW New Media Wiki.
For even more detail, I’ve created a screencast entitled How to Embed FLV Video in MediaWiki.
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