Hey All - thought I'd pass on a few undocumented Media Mill features that might be useful to you web nerd types.

First off - a new feature - when requesting a thumbnail, you can optionally request that we draw a "play" overlay on top of it.  So, if you want to embed our thumbnails on a page, but have them launch your video in a lightbox or some such, you get a nice visual indicator.  Many thanks to Pete Wiringa for the idea and the graphic.

To get the overlay, just add &showOverlay=true to the thumbnail url, so for example:
https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/thumb.php?id=39&showOverlay=true

You can get different size thumbs by appending &big=true or &tiny=true as well.

Another thing that comes up sometimes is folks wanting to load/embed videos using only the derivative ID which is assigned to each derivative.  Our sample HTML doesn't do it that way, but it is possible using a few undocumented keys in the query string.

To get thumbnails that way, specify mediaId instead of id in the query string:
https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/thumb.php?mediaId=57145

To get captions use derivtrans instead of archtrans
http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/download.php?derivtrans=2453

There are a couple other changes in the pipeline relating to how Quicktime derivatives are displayed - we may switch the default so that new QT derivatives play via the Flash player, so that you get the benefits of QT (fast derivative creation) and the benefits of Flash (plays anywhere).  We'd be holding off on making that the default, since it requires Flash 9, but I think it's probably safe now.  And of course, you'll be able to disable it (you can currently enable it, globally for new derivatives in preferences, or per-video via the 'flash options' page).

Anywho, mostly just wanted to show off Peter's cool play graphic, so cheers!

-Colin


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Colin McFadden
CLA-OIT Academic Technologies
University of Minnesota
Office: (612)-626-6646
Cell: (612)-702-0779
Fax: (612)-624-0017