Sunday, 31 March 2013 23:26

HM Tube Featured

Written by
Rate this item
(5 votes)

Introduction

HM Tube is a Joomla! plugin designed to play YouTube videos using Jw Player's customizations and skins inside Joomla! articles. The program was born of necessity in a time when there were not any plugins that suited my needs precisely. Although, at the time, there were many modules that played video, there were few that did this as a video; therefore, I created HM Tube to fill that need. Because it was exciting to see my own code at work, I decided to share it with the Joomla! community.

Currently, HM Tube has the following features:

  • Add video, local or YouTube, to your article.
  • Plays the following formats:
    • Video Formats: H.264 (.mp4, .mov, .f4v), FLV (.flv), 3GPP (.3gp, .3g2), YouTube
    • Sound Formats: AAC (.aac, .m4a), MP3 (.mp3)
    • Image Formats: JPEG (.jpg), PNG (.png), GIF (.gif)
  • Use JW player and it's many version 2 skins.
  • Stream live video with JW player's RTMP support. (should work, not tested)
  • Customize the width and height of the player.
  • Position the control bar to top, bottom, or over the video.
  • Hide the control bar when idle.
  • You can choose to auto start the video on page load or not.
  • Choose to enable HD video if applicable.
  • Ability to choose which type of stretching, if any, is applied to the video to fit your player.

Installation

  1. Download from hmtube_1_1.zip
  2. Install like any other Joomla plugin. Refer too http://docs.joomla.org/Installing_an_extension if you need help.
  3. Don't forget to enable the plugin through the plugin administration.

Usage

Using HM Tube is very simple. Just find the supported (privacy enhanced YouTube URLs are NOT supported) YouTube video you want to include in your article and enclose it inside the following tags:

[hmyt ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxku0EpqzKI[/hmyt]

This will produce a video like the following:

This text will be replaced

Plugin Configuration

The above video received its parameters like width, height, skin type and ect from pre-selected defaults c  chosen in the admin section. As of version 1.0, the basic option section looks like this in Joomla! 3.0.x:

HM Tube Basic Options

Each of these options can also be set as tag parameters which will override the plugin admin settings. For example, if I wanted to change the width and height I could do in by adding the width and/or height tag like this:

[hmyt width = "400" height="250" ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I[/hmyt]

See the space between the " and ] right before http? Ignore that space. I had to write into the program a way to post these tags as instructional material without the plugin creating a video out of it. The extra space there is a result.

The result of the above change looks like this (one of my fav music videos):

This text will be replaced

TagValuesExampleDescription
width numeric width="500" Change player width.
height numeric width="500" Change player height.
skin nameofskin skin="slim" Change the player skin.
hd true of false hd="true" Turn on HD if available.
controlbar over, bottom, top controlbar="bottom" Location of player control bar.
controlbarhide true or false controlbarhide="true" Hide the controlbar until mouseover.
autostart true or false autostart="true" Autostart the video on page load.
stretching uniform, fill, exact, none stretching="none" How the video stretching inside the player.

Advanced Options

There are also a few advanced options. A user of HM Tube requested control over the player alignment. As a result I added a few more options that look like the following in Joomla! 3.0.x:

 

As you can see from the above picture, you can now change the player alignment, the margins and padding surrounding the player, and you can even give it a background color, border, border thickness, and border color.

Read 103160 times Last modified on Sunday, 07 April 2013 14:59
More in this category: PreziHM »

1 comment

  • Comment Link Super User Tuesday, 30 April 2013 20:52 posted by Super User

    It does work with Joomla 3.1.1. Can you elaborate on the issues you are having?

Login to post comments