We’ve been hard at work on the Hyperactive codebase for the last few months, it’s probably time to post an update here. This release was code-named “Planet Male Madness” in tribute to one of the greats in the Indymedia movement.
Recent development effort has been spent mostly on video. If you take a look at a video page on the development site you’ll notice that there are lots of new features available.
- Related content is automatically shown on the right hand side. Related content could be other videos, articles, or events. It’s generated automatically by the search engine software embedded in the site. You can see an example of a vid with related content here.
- featured videos are shown on the right hand side
- recent videos are shown on the right hand side
- if the video was uploaded inside of an article or event, that article or event is displayed.
- the flash video player now does full-screen mode if the user’s flash player supports it
- all uploaded video is currently retained in its original format, and transcoded to Ogg Theora standard as well. I know that some people have strong feelings about codec choices, this will require more discussion.
- clicking on “How to download” reveals instructions regarding how to download the video via Bittorrent peer-to-peer software, and how to subscribe to the site’s video feeds. I would really appreciate it if people could read this text and offer suggestions on how to improve it.
Incidentally, this is the way I’d like to handle help text throughout the site – we can put that little ”?” icon on a page and have any necessary help text get revealed right where the user is.
- the hiding controls have now been improved so that the show up as “inappropriate video?”. If you have permission to hide content, this reveals a “hide this” form when clicked. If you don’t have permission to hide content, it reveals a “report this as inappropriate” form when clicked. The contents of the form are automatically emailed to admins, and content is hidden immediately if the user has hiding permission.
- the site now implements the Transmission metadata feed standard, which means that people can now subscribe to screening-quality video and the bandwidth is shared among site users (we don’t pay for most of it).
