Understand the player customization features of the IBM Connections Media Library

IBM Connections is a social software designed specifically to meet business needs, leveraging social resources to help business develop, such as it helps business people build a network of subject matter experts to make them more innovative and productive. It promotes the creation of a vibrant community of employees, partners, and customers, exchanging creative ideas and helping to grow the business. With the IBM connections upgrade, IBM connections offers a more convenient way to expand the existing applications of IBM connections, integrate existing assets with IBM connections, and make IBM Con Nections embedded in other applications. Media Gallery (library) is an important part of the IBM Connections Community (Community) component. It can display pictures, video, audio and other multimedia files in various forms, and also support the playback of video audio. This article will first explain how to extend the file types of your media library to support the management of more types of video files, and then resolve how to customize the video player to play these extended video files by simply introducing the IBM connections extension point mechanism.

Introduction to the Media Library and advanced user requirements

IBM Connections is a social software designed specifically to meet the needs of the business. It helps business people build a network of subject matter experts, making them more innovative and productive. It promotes the creation of a vibrant community of employees, partners, and customers, exchanging creative ideas and helping to grow the business. Media Gallery is an important part of the IBM Connections Community (Community) component. It can display pictures, video, audio and other multimedia files in various forms, and also support the playback of video audio. Media Gallery combines social networking features such as tagging, recommendation, comment, multimedia file content, or review of comments.

The type of audio video file supported by the Out-of-the-box Media Library is as follows:

Therefore, if the file name extension is not. mov,. mp4,.flv, users can not upload files to the Media library, and even by changing the extension to upload files, the Media Library can not play these files, because the out-of-the-box Media Library on the support of the code has strict restrictions, See video coding and Audio coding bar.

However, there are many types of multimedia files in the market, such as 3GP, MP3,WMV,RMVB,MPG, etc., in the face of such a lot of commonly used video files, users may need to use the video converter to convert it into a. mov,.mp4,.flv to upload to the Media Library, which is very inconvenient. So is there a way to make the media Library support more types of multimedia files? Here's an advanced customization feature for the Media Library, where you can customize the media Library to manage files with more than one extension, and change the Media Library's use of players, using the more powerful players you like or have.

Customize the extensions supported by the Media Library

Before the specific customization steps begin, we need to analyze which extensions to expand according to the common user needs. Here we consider the following:

1.SWF is a support vector and lattice graphics animation file format, is widely used in web design, animation and other fields, SWF files are often referred to as Flash files. SWF popularity is high, and now more than 99% of all network users can read SWF files. Considering the popularity of Flash files, we consider supporting this type of media file

2.3PG is a 3G streaming video encoding format, mainly in order to match the 3G network of high-speed transmission speed and developed, but also a mobile phone video format. 3GP is a simplified version of the MP4 format, the current 3GP file has two different standards: 3GPP (for GSM mobile phones, the extension of. 3gp), 3GPP2 (for CDMA mobile phones, the extension of. 3g2) in both formats are used MPEG-4 and H.263, and Sound is based on AAC or AMR standards. Considering the popularity of mobile devices, there are many videos that may be in this format.

3. RM and RMVB. RM format is a streaming media Video file format developed by RealNetworks company, which can develop different compression ratios according to the different rates of network data transmission, so as to realize the real-time transmission and playback of video files on the Internet at low speed. The RMVB format is extended from the streaming media's RM movie format to the ascent level. VB is VBR, which is the Variable bit Rate (the bit rate can be changed) English shrink. RMVB broke the original RM format that average compression sampling method, on the basis of guaranteeing the average compression ratio, set the average sampling rate of twice times the maximum sampling rate value. The higher bit rate is applied to the complex dynamic picture (song and dance, Rook, war, etc.), while in the static screen is flexible to a lower sampling rate, reasonable use of bit rate resources, so that RMVB at the expense of a small part of the film you do not know the quality of the maximum compression of the film size. As the main compression format for the movie, we also consider supporting this type of media file.

In summary, we implement the Media Library to support the original video file extension based on the following customization. Swf,.3gp,.3g2,.rm,.rmvb.

To deploy to the IBM WebSphere application Server For example, the following steps are:

Find Widgets-config.xml File

If your environment is a clustered environment, please find this file under the DM profile, such as ... \websphere\appserver\profiles\dmgr01 \config\cells\<cell_name>\lotusconnections-config\widgets-config.xml ; Find this file under the Appsrv profile, such as ... \WEBSPHERE\APPSERVER\PROFILES\APPSRV01 \config\cells\<cell_name>\lotusconnections-config\ Widgets-config.xml, the following is an example of a cluster environment.

Check out the Widgets-config.xml file

The Widgets-config.xml file is the configuration file for the community component, and we need to run the wsadmin command to check it out. The code listing is as follows:

Listing 1. Run Wsadmin, check out the configuration file Widgets-config.xml

CD <was_home>\profiles\dmgr01\bin 
Wsadmin.bat–lang jython–user <wasadmin>-password <admin_ password> 
execfile ("communitiesadmin.py") 
communitiesconfigservice.checkoutwidgetsconfig ("C:/TMP2"), "Myservernode01cell")

Where C:/TMP2 is the temporary directory where the file is checked out, you can temporarily place the file in any convenient path. Myservernode01cell is the cell name of the WebSphere application Server that deploys the community (Community), which is required and case sensitive.

Edit the Checked-out document, plus the extension. swf,.3gp,.3g2,.rm,.rmvb locate the checked out Widgets-config.xml file in the temporary working directory C:/TMP2 find <item name= "Validvideoexts" Value= "mp4, mov,flv"/>, at value, add extension-supported file extensions, separated by commas, such as: <item name= "Validvideoexts value=" mp4,mov,flv,swf,3gp, 3g2,rm,rmvb "/>, save the file.

Check in the changed file Communitiesconfigservice.checkinwidgetsconfig ("C:/tmp2", "Myservernode01cell")