Show Thread Enhancements - AME 2.0 -Auto Media Embedding for posts, blogs, visitor and group messsages

From the creators of French and Toast comes a sweet and sticky enchanement to the New York Times best-seller: AME - Auto Media Embedding

AME 2.0 - The Embedder Strikes Back!

AME has won Mod of the Month for Spetember 08. Thanks!

Note that 2.5 Gold has been released. Click Here.

Discussions for AME 2.5 RC 1 start here

AME 2.0 is the next version of the "Mod of the Month" winning media embedder that:

• Allows user to simply 'paste' in a URL (i.e. a youtube link) without needing to know any special tags. However instead of displaying just the URL, it will show the media within the post
• is lightweight as it does all of her chores without the overhead of having 1 bbcode per pattern or trying to parse a post every single time it gets displayed with a bunch of patterns. AME radically reduces overhead and speeds up processing. The only time ame will kick in is after creating a new post or after editing an existing one (or if an ame tag is found)
• is extensible. She allows you to add, edit, delete, import and export patterns. That way you can decide which services to support, how they should look and then share them with others! At time of typing this, there are over 150 media sites that have been contributed by vBulletin.org members
• can extract the title (requires your server to allow url wrappers with fetch_contents)
• can extract embed code from sites whose URLs do not contain sufficient information to embed the video
• can rebuild your old posts to convert your 'other' mediaish tags into URL tags.
• can rebuild your old posts, blogs, comments, visitor and social group messages to convert URL tags into ame tags where needed
• can convert her codes BACK to url codes so you're not stuffed with a bunch of dead tags if you uninstall!
• won't uglify your site by having videos appear in quotes, php, code or html blocks (blech!)
• can be globally disabled
• can be excluded from forums
• can exclude usergroups
• can be toggled on/off per post, blog, comment, visitor and social group message
• would cook dinner for you if she had arms
• can wrap the output in a 'container' with original URL
• has a super comprehensive admincp help system. Yes, I actually took the bloody time to add all the info you need into vB's admincp help system. If you ask a silly question in this thread that is addressed in the help system, you will be taunted.
• is fully phrased
• has hooks around integral operations so you can extend it
• Supports embedding in vbBlog, Visitor Messages and Social Groups.
• Can be disabled in one or more of the following sections: Posts, vbBlog, Visitor Messages and/or Social Groups

Apart from the additional areas of support around vbBlog, Visitor Messages and Social Groups, little has changed about AME since version 1.0 released over a year ago. I cleaned up a few minor bugs, trimmed and updated the default definitions.

Which sites are supported?

At time of counting this, there are about 170 sites supported. But I have only included a few common standards as default (yahoo, youtube, myspace, google and Amazon). Why only these? AME was designed with its own import and export system that enables users to create or modify definitions and share them with the community. This keeps the system lightweight, customisable and saves us all from having to upgrade every time a media site changes their URL structure or if I add another site.

Check out the 'add ons' section of this post below to see availible add-ons.



Installation/Upgrade

• Upload the contents of the forums folder into your forums directory and import the product-ame.xml file into your product manager (if upgrading, choose 'yes' to overwrite previous installation).
• After installation, make sure that the system is on (admincp->AME CP->Settings)
• Then you may want to try to rebuild old URLs via the tools option.

Big thanks goes out to all those in the community that have supported this mod. Especially Digital Jedi Who has created about 155 definitions for this system alone!

Change Log


2.0.2 - fixed added slashes in quote blocks (DoH!), vm advanced error and incrimented product version. You need to replace include/ame_bb_code.php and re-import the product-ame.xml to upgrade
2.0.1 - fixed missing backslashes in code blocks

2.5 Pre-Release information

Attached to this post is pre-release of version 2.5

2.5 is a pretty major upgrade from the 2.0 series and adds the following functionality to 2.0:

• New in Beta 3 - Validation ability. This will help prevent media being embedded that can not be embedded (i.e. youtube videos that the author has stipulated can not be shown off of youtube). This option requires the extraction option to be turned on and a valid validation regexp. I have included one in the default youtube version. When a video on you tube gets embedded, but the author doesnt allow embedding, a link (with icon) is shown instead.
• Ability to prevent non authorised usergroups from viewing (see Readme file in zip for more info)
• Usergroup permissions (edit usergroup to adjust edit/view permissions)
• Template driven system - uses templates now instead of 1 master replacement (see Readme file in zip for more info)
• Signatures supported
• Different sizes and template configurations for each supported zone (posts, blogs, groups, visitor messages and signatures)
• A couple new hooks (Mainly to support a future add on for AME media in profiles)
• Notfication system (similar to vB's to check for errors)
• Definition keys for easier updating of definitions and to use in templates
• File caching system which radically reduces processing
• And more that I cant think of off the top of my head!

Note that while previous definitions will work with the new system, they will not be sizeable by zone. Since DJ helped with the private beta testing, I am sure he will be releasing 2.5 versions of his definitions soon.

Please note that 2.5 is a pre-release so there will be issues. If you want more stability, use 2.x until this version becomes gold FWIW: The only items currently outstanding are to add some missing admincp help. The rest is working as intended as far as I can tell

nJoy

[The Geek]

Thanks to all who supported AME as MotM. We won

[SakuraAsakura]

^_^ kawai

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by xtremeoff-road

Anyone having a problem embedding google videos? Mine was working and after upgrading to 2.5 no longer works for google videos...

All I get is a small box with nothing in it, but the info extracts and shows in the header of the box?

Thanks!

Originally Posted by The Geek

hmmm... looks like google just changed thier url format. /sigh

Scratch that, they have changed their whole system. Looks like Google now links to original content via a frame. This will make it very hard (if not impossible) to translate google video links to embeded media as we will never be able to tell what source Google is linking to.

Yeah, Google Video has decided to be another one of these endless video harvesting site, just like LongIslandOnline. I don't quite get the point of that. But in any case, Google Video will only work for Google hosted video.

@xtremeoff-road: When you try to embed the URL for a YouTube video you found on Google Video, you have to use the YouTube permalink. Not the Google link. That's just one of the downsides to sites that decide they want to be harvesters of everyone else's videos. I'm just going to have to go through all these new sites their adding and see if I can make a working definition for each of them.

Originally Posted by The Geek

Thanks to all who supported AME as MotM. We won

Pulled way out in front towards the end there. Congrats.

[Nadeemjp]

i installed 2.0.2 but the amazon icon is not showing in my different styles.
although i have uploaded the image to image/misc folder of the respective styles but i am not seeing the amazon icon.

rest of the procedure was followed as told.

am i missing something?

[The Geek]

Is there a broken image?

[sweeps78]

I'm trying to convert all my media tags to ame tags, but can't seem to get it working correctly. First off, I just went back a week for safety reasons.

I went to Tools->Convert Codes and entered "media" (no quotes or brackets) into the Codes box. Then, in the Conversions box, I entered "\1" (again, no quotes or brackets). This converted all of the media tags to url tags.

I didn't know what to do at this point, because I thought this would have converted my media tags to the ame tags that AME uses... So, I tried to Rebuild my old posts and had the following settings:

Remove [ame] codes => no
Ignore previous => yes
Test mode => no
Verbose => no
How far to go back => 1 week
Per page => 100
Seconds per page => 10

First of all, there's some sort of nasty bug with this, because after I clicked Save, there were 27 pages that the system tried going through, 24 of which were past 1 week.

That aside, I didn't see any of the url tagged posts get converted to ame tags.

What am I doing wrong??

[The Geek]

The convert tools change media tags to URL ones, not AME tags. Once you 'un-media' them, you can rebuild as you mentioned.

What version are you using?

Try running in test mode and verbose so you can see the changes it is trying to make.

Also remember to click install if you have installed

[sweeps78]

Also remember to click install if you have installed

thanks! I totally forgot.

What version are you using?

The version I'm running is 2.5 RC 1.

The convert tools change media tags to URL ones, not AME tags.

Cool, that's what I thought

Try running in test mode and verbose so you can see the changes it is trying to make.

That's just it. When I try to run the Rebuild, it says there is 29 pages to go through, but only 4 of them are within the week that I specified.

I did perform a little test of my own. I created a new post in a hidden forum. This post contained 1) A youtube video using the media tag 2) A youtube link with the ame tag.

When I ran the Rebuild, the post showed up with the message:

post 21127: Ignored (already contains ame)

[Hostboard]

Better support, more media coverage I am a convert from "the other one"

Thank you!

[The Geek]

Sweep - it will have ignored it because you posted it while AME was active. Since the ignore previous option was set to yes, it wont try to reprocess those that it knows have been 'amefied'

Sounds to me that the only hiccup here is the time restraint. Everything else should be cool ye?