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View Full Version : Music/Videos in profile


jerx
12-01-2008, 09:37 AM
There are similar mods already, but they are not featurich enough.

I was thinking of having a media player on each user' s profile, which plays a playlist of 10 songs or videos. I might want to seperate the two players, one for music only and the other for videos only. I am afraid there could be display problems to have different media types in one playlist. Songs and videos will be hosted elsewhere, either on a video portal or on a free file hoster.

What is needed?

1. a flv player. I have found two:
http://www.mcmediaplayer.com/
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player
One of those will be integrated in profile. I think that this won' t be a problem. There are some articles about adding a new tab or block to your profile.

2. (a) new custom profile field(s).
I am not sure what to use for the playlist. It will probably look like this:
http://h1.ripway.com/shakiro/playlists/Music.xml
Either using 20 single line input fields for the playlist or using 1 text area input field.
I think using 20 custom profile fields is a little bit easier concerning coding knowledge, but it does not look very efficient.
A text area custom profile field is setup more quickly and might have performance advantages, because you do not add uneccessary columns to your database. Probably only 20% of the users will use the player. If presented to the user, you need to strip off all code from the playlist but the media title and url.
I don' t know if performance is an issue with having so many custom profile fields. I have looked at the pc specs mod and they all seem to use single line profile fields.

3. optional, but desired: users should be able to sort their playlist.
I don' t know if there is a variable for the position in the playlist, I have not seen one yet. Maybe you need to have an extra custom profile field for each media. I have seen a non vb site where the playlist was displayed and you were able to click up and down arrows to move the songs. It probably was javascript.

I think that this is all you need to create such a mod. If you notice that I have forgotten something important or the outline of this mod is wrong, please reply.

But my main questions are these:
1. which player would you choose or is their a better one?
2. 20 fields or one field only? What php functions would be needed, eg preg_replace?