Running on something like 10 hours trying to figure this out...I'd appreciate if some people could weigh in and we could give a current state-of-the-art in terms of process or strategy for embedding both Flash SWFs and FLVs inline for nodes. I'll try and compile the info into this post as it's laid out.
We've been trying this with tinyMCE (bulk of efforts) and also fckEditor, with lots of frustration and little progress. Chasing lots of leads. Here is the goal: simply put, we want the end-user to be able to embed Flash SWFs OR FLVs with the same ease a picture is put in, and the same flow. A wysiwyg button opens up a file browser, a file is selected, some basic options are available, and it is then embedded.
We cannot seem to get this to work at all with FLV files, with any editor, which is the main problem. SWFs work fine, but for our purposes it's more desirable to separate form from content, and have the files only worry about the movie, not the controls and settings.
We also implemented SWFTools for FlowPlayer3...so to embed a pretty video player we've got it down to inserting the code [swf file="mymovie.swf"] and it works with swfs or flvs, etc. The trouble starts back up when we try to write a module that plugs in with tinyMCE or fckEditor to append that code. And where do we flag issues for things like that? The editor-specific project pages are depreciated!
Update:
See below for my second post. There's at least one option now!
Thanks!
Comments
Only got it working w/ Xinha
I've never managed to get the Drupal stuff to work at all. The only WYSIWYG I ever got to work with .flv and .swf files out of the box was Xinha. It just worked by default. But, I don't think there's an updated WYSIWYG port for that WYSIWYG. FWIW, Xinha also has decent file management which is lacking in IMCE. I even prefer the (out of the box) image placement. Alas, media seems to be an option as a selection box only. I've not seen any way to make it work (yet). Well, everything works but for the actual media player -- which kinda seems important to me.
You could rewrite the IMCE and media tools, and perhaps this is as simple as choosing or writing a player to handle the media itself. I'm tempted to just sidestep the whole hassle and use the Xinha media handler for my own purposes.
Having it play the files in
Having it play the files in the editor is not important. Just put a box on the screen. The box can show the filename, with the set dimensions (widthxheight), which can be resized like you do an image.
Visit my under-construction site. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
It doesn't work for visitors
I've yet to see ANYTHING successfully play the media for visitors out of the box. That means I need to write or find a player and write the UI to resize, etc. the player. That basically means there's no media tool at all :) It's just a UI to pick a file and do nothing with it if it doesn't play when people visit the site.
I haven't spent much time on the drawing board with this issue. I've heard good stuff out of the media folks for D7, but so far haven't seen any hope for D6 without writing it myself, and I'm not sure I've got the time or expertise to do that right now.
Found a Solution!
The other Drupaler in our shop just got a solution up and running that uses a WYSIWYG with file browser, which allows the insertion of generated keyframes from the movie that are lightboxed to the movie itself. We needed a solution that would allow people to upload and insert inline video without writing any code at all.
It's basically the Video module configured with Lightbox2 using its lightvideo tag, with TinyMCE as the WYSIWYG.
There was a glitch in the filename handling of Lightbox2 that normally would prevent it from detecting the movie type correctly when dealing with videos converting to FLV via Video, but he tracked it down and submitted a patch (http://drupal.org/node/683856) which as of right now is critical for this to work.
We still feel it's a bit of a kludge, but it does accomplish the goal. The keyframes from the video are generated automatically and are configurable, so the user flow is that they upload their movie, wait until it's converted on the server (if it's not an FLV), hit the insert image button on the node they want it inline, navigate to the "movie_thumbnails" directory, insert it, then hit the link button, navigate to "movie_converted" (I forget the exact folder name) folder and link to that, then use the drop down box to select the linking method as "lightvideo".