Media Gallery Update Tonight

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 18, 2014

After 00:00 GMT on Saturday 19 July we'll be installing the latest version of our gallery software. It can happen that from time to time the board will be offline for a few minutes.

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 19, 2014

Update done, instead of fixed bugs we have some new ones instead

Forwarded them to the maker of the software, hopefully getting a hotfix for it asap

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 19, 2014

Most issues resolved, two small bugs remain.

Btw: videos are now also responsive all over the gallery and forums.

William Wester · Jul 19, 2014

I assume your media gallery uses Flash for video playback as I can't watch them on my phone. I didn't have this problem prior to the latest KitKat update which I realized after the fact that Flash is not supported any longer.
Does anyone know of a way to play flash in a browser on the latest Android OS (Apple iOS doesn't support Flash either)?
It's great that there is a resource like this on RD but the technology used for video playback is going away, unless I am overlooking something.

Thanks

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 19, 2014

I am no phone expert but as far as I know it's only Apple that can't handle flash.

Just tested the gallery on my Bramsung S2 with Android and videos play fine, actually better than yesterday as they are now fully responsive and fit the screen perfect.

William Wester · Jul 19, 2014

Android was fine until the latest OS - KitKat, and I don't think there will be anymore support going forward. The first issue is with Adobe, which long ago ended support of Flash on mobile devices. RD isn't the only place I (and many other Android and Apple users) cannot see Flash content, too bad but technology is constantly changing/evolving.

PS, I have been working in the IT field for many years, the moving technology target is a daily challenge.

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 19, 2014

Thats the reason why I never update my OS on my Phone.

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 20, 2014

And the last two remaining bugs have been solved now as well. Good night

Bram Hengeveld · Jul 22, 2014

Sidebar widget is fixed as well and is now displaying the latest content submitted to the media gallery (photos or videos)

Dave Stephenson · Jul 24, 2014

William Wester said:
Android was fine until the latest OS - KitKat, and I don't think there will be anymore support going forward. The first issue is with Adobe, which long ago ended support of Flash on mobile devices. RD isn't the only place I (and many other Android and Apple users) cannot see Flash content, too bad but technology is constantly changing/evolving.

PS, I have been working in the IT field for many years, the moving technology target is a daily challenge.

Most (all maybe) of the videos are embedded Youtube players. Unless Google offers a modile/android safe embed code I'm not sure what can be done. I'll do a little research and see what I can come up with, there must be something as I really don't think they would make a change to android that would outright stop users from viewing one of their most widely used revenue generating machines.

William Wester · Jul 24, 2014

Dave Stephenson said:
Most (all maybe) of the videos are embedded Youtube players. Unless Google offers a modile/android safe embed code I'm not sure what can be done. I'll do a little research and see what I can come up with, there must be something as I really don't think they would make a change to android that would outright stop users from viewing one of their most widely used revenue generating machines.

YouTube videos are fine, I just can't play the embedded videos from the RD gallery. Instead of clicking on the video to play, I click the YouTube link and the videos then play fine within the YouTube portal. I just brought this up as the browser based media library software used on RD will not be compatible with more and more devices as time goes on, Flash is being phased out.

Dave Stephenson · Jul 25, 2014

William Wester said:
YouTube videos are fine, I just can't play the embedded videos from the RD gallery. Instead of clicking on the video to play, I click the YouTube link and the videos then play fine within the YouTube portal. I just brought this up as the browser based media library software used on RD will not be compatible with more and more devices as time goes on, Flash is being phased out.

Yes flash is stepping back a little from the forefront but I think at the moment it's still incredibly widespread in use for both new content and old and won't be disappearing overnight. It's only real hold in the past has been that there was no open standard that was widely adopted by all browser and devices. That's changed with HTML5 but at the moment we still need to offer a solution that covers both HTML5 and flash as there are still browsers in wide enough use that have sketchy support for the new video tags and WebM etc. for a pure HTML5 solution to also prove problematic for some sers.

I haven't taken a look yet but my suspicion is that the mod we're using may use the old style of Youtube embed code which afiak only delivers flash content. If that's the case it's a reasonably straight forward fix. I'll get chance to address it over the weekend. I'll tag you when I'm done so you can give it a spin and let me know it's working for you.

Dave Stephenson · Jul 26, 2014

@William Wester

The media section is using the correct embedding method to support the HTML5 player. With flash disabled in all my browsers the HTML5 player is delivered automatically. I can also view them on my android 4 device with plugins disabled, however the settings in that browser suck big time so I have no idea if that actually disables flash or not. Sorry I don't have any device with android 5 atm to test with.

A quick search around Google has thrown up other people having similar issues but they tend to only be in the stock browser. The stock browser in 3/4 sucked big time, sounds like it may be more of the same in 5. I'm inclined at this point to think it's a browser issue and probably out of our control. In support of that I haven't had any complaints to date that the gallery has issues on apple devices which of course also don't ship with flash, but I'll get someone to confirm that for me.

Are you using the stock browser? If you have another browser installed or don't mind installing one would you give it a try and see how you get on with it?

William Wester · Jul 26, 2014

@Dave Stephenson

I have the default Android 4.4.2 browser, FireFox, and Dolphin on my cell. I have been using FireFox lately and videos won't play (spinning icon) and no error/message. If I use Dolphin I will get a "Flash Player needed, click here to see how to download the Flash Player". This link opens a page with two options; "In Android 4.0-4.3, how to I enable Flash Player? - Go to menu>Settings...." and "In Android 4.4, how to I enable Flash Player? - The Adobe Flash Player is no longer compatible with Android 4.4 Kitkat devices...".
For kicks I tried the default browser, haven't run that in ages, and guess what, the video's played within RD... what the heck

Google made is clear Flash wasn't going to be supported.
Anyway, I guess there is a way on KitKat "for now", not sure I want to use the default browser but that isn't your problem.
Thanks for looking into this, good to know.

Dave Stephenson · Jul 27, 2014

@William Wester It's Google who detect which browser you're using and display the appropriate player, it would appear that they don't correctly identify Dolphin at the moment for some reason or other. There's no way I can find to force the HTML5 player from our side so testing from our side won't achieve anything so we're in the lap of the GoogleGod for that.

This may help. In the reply to this post they suggest switching the user agent to iPhone.
https://www.facebook.com/DolphinFans/posts/434295026623789

As for Firefox, I do use it on Android but no matter what I do to try and disable flash I always get the flash player so I can't do much testing in that department unfortunately. It does however support H.264 and WebM with the html5 video tags from what is specified online if it's up to date.

It might help if you are logged in to Google all the time to specifically choose specifically to prefer the html5 player. http://youtube.com/html5

Beyond that I'm really not sure there's much that can be done at the moment.