Media players
Development > MediaPlayers
This page will provide an overview of the digital object media player(s) supported in AtoM, which are used to allow users to play access derivative copies of streaming media such as video and audio files in the browser. It was first created on 2018-11-23, and is current as of the AtoM 2.4 and 2.5 releases.
Contents
Early implementation
The current media library, Flowplayer, was implemented in the 1.0.8-beta release. At the time, Flowplayer was a flash-based video player (version 3.1 of Flowplayer was released in April 2009), and version 3.1.5 was added to AtoM in August of 2009, and included in the 1.0.8 release.
Current status
Since the initial implementation of Flowplayer in AtoM, no major upgrades or changes have been made to AtoM's time-based media playback functionality. Meanwhile, increasing discoveries of security vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits in Flash have led an increasing number of browsers and platforms to disavow Flash support, starting as early as 2010, when Steve Jobs stated that Apple would not allow Flash on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad – citing abysmal security as one reason (source). Since then, with increasing security problems being discovered in Flash and the arrival of HTML5 (which supports native video playback), most major browsers have chosen to disable Flash by default.
Flowplayer itself has redesigned its media player and while they do still maintain a Flash implementation, future development efforts have been focused on an HTML5 version of the player. Support for version 3.1.5, which AtoM still uses, has been discontinued for some time. The Flowplayer Flash version has not been actively developed since 2014, and the last major release was version 3.2.18. At this point, it is likely that support for Flash will be fully discontinued by 2020.
AtoM is in need of an updated open source media player.
Replacement requirements
Any new video player replacement for AtoM should:
- Be open source
- Be HTML5-based
- Be able to play audio as well
- Ideally, include a Flash fallback for legacy browser users
- Support a broad range of playback formats
- Be under active development
- Include basic responsive support for different devices and screen sizes
- Support accessibility, including:
- ARIA support for screenreaders
- Keyboard control support
- Subtitle support
Evaluating options
In August of 2018, Artefactual explored the current open source HTML5 video player landscape in search of a replacement candidate that met our requirements. We found the following page extremely useful in evaluating the best contenders:
After exploring the options listed in the site above, as well as any other popular options that met our criteria we could find, we found the following 3 players to be the closest match to our requirements:
Able Player
MediaElement.js
- Webpage
- GitHub code repository (examples included on homepage)
Accessible HTML5 Video Player
- Webpage (basically just a big example video player)
- GitHub code repository
Final recommendation
The Artefactual team decided MediaElement.js would be the best fit as a replacement video player for AtoM.
First developed by John Dyer at the Dallas Theological Seminary and released under MIT license, MediaElement.js is a widely-used project under active development, built responsively with a unified API that can fall back gracefully to Flash, which includes ARIA screen-reader support, subtitles, chapters and playlists, keyboard control, and more. The look and feel is skinnable, it requires no additional Javascript library support, and can also support playback of videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion. It also has a plugin ecosystem that can further extend functionality, such as adding basic Google Analytics support, preview on hover, and extended playback controls.
Artefactual has prepared initial development estimates for our community based on implementing MediaElement as the replacement for the current Flowplayer.
We selected the H.264/MPEG-4 video format for in-browser video playback due to its broad support across desktop and mobile browsers and operating systems (e.g. Windows, Mac OSX, iOS, Android). AtoM currently uses the MP3 audio format for in-browser audio playback, which will remain unchanged.