[Pro] Scripty Lightbox

Freeway
1

Following the suggestion I received earlier, I installed Scripty Lightbox. It works absolutely perfectly when I preview the site locally. However, I have now upload the site to a hosting service, and it opens a new window roughly the size of the screen instead of the little window with the Close above the upper right hand corner.

Questions:

  1. Any ideas?
  2. What is the best format to have short video clips in? They are under 2 minutes. I need to minimize download time.

Thank you.

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2

ScriptyLightbox can figure out the size of pictures directly, but it
can’t figure out QuickTime or Flash. You need to use the dimensions
fields in the Action to set the dimensions of your movie.

H.264 QuickTime is going to give you the best bang for your byte. It’s
fairly ubiquitous – anyone who owns an iPod has it installed on their
computer (Mac or PC). If you really need to cover every browser on
earth, there are a number of Flash techniques you can use, some of
which are just a shallow wrapper around QuickTIme. For my money and
time, I say stick with QT.

Walter

On May 30, 2009, at 1:55 PM, Bob Gordon wrote:

Questions:

  1. Any ideas?
  2. What is the best format to have short video clips in? They are
    under 2 minutes. I need to minimize download time.

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3

Walter, I have noticed that when I display a picture in ScriptyLightbox (the latest version) everything works perfectly with one exception. On both of our PCs in IE7, the first time you click on the thumbnail, it gives you that tiny little box that is smaller than the thumbnail. After the first time, IE seems to find it’s footing and from then on everything displays correctly. I’m not picking nits here, just wondering if you were aware of this or had seen it before.

Warner

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4

I have values in the fields of the action. When I preview it, it more or less works. When I Preview in Browser, it works perfectly. It is only when I view the page after it has been up loaded that it does not work.

Do the values have to be the dimensions of the movie? The previews suggest not.

Is there a working example somewhere?

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5

The working example is not up right now, I am having trouble with my DSL.

Try a simple test first. Place one graphic box on a new blank page, put a preview of your movie in it, and apply the Graphic Link to File Action to it. Link it to your movie using the Action.

Now apply the ScriptyLightbox Action to that same graphic box. Set the height and width to match your movie.

Publish and preview in a browser. See what happens.

Now, if you want to have more than one movie on the page, you have to do things this way:

Draw one HTML box on the page, apply the ScriptyLightbox Action to it, and set the height and width to the largest size of your movies (or the only size, if they’re all the same size).

Then double-click inside the HTML box, and use Insert / Graphic Item to add an inline graphic box to that HTML box. Click once on the graphic box, import your first preview image, and apply the Graphic Link To File Action and target your movie. Add some right and bottom padding to the graphic to keep it from running into the next preview image.

Make sure the graphic box is still selected, and copy it to the clipboard. Double-click next to it in the HTML box so you see a flashing text cursor, and paste as many times as you have movies.

Now go back through these copies and re-target them to the correct movies, and update the images inside them so they have the correct previews.

Finally, you can preview and enjoy.

All of this hassle is due to the way that I hacked around the problem that a QuickTime movie cannot be asked what size it is after the fact – you have to tell the plugin how much room to set aside before the movie loads. The original JavaScript library I use (LightWindow) requires the user to encode the size of the movie using a non-standard (breaks validation) tag attribute. I may have a way to work around this problem, but I’m too busy right now to work on it. For now, this is the way that you have to work if you want to use QuickTime or Flash in a ScriptyLightbox.

Walter

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6

Sometime around 2/6/09 (at 21:52 -0400) waltd said:

All of this hassle is due to the way that I hacked around the
problem that a QuickTime movie cannot be asked what size it is after
the fact – you have to tell the plugin how much room to set aside
before the movie loads.

I wonder whether working with the problem from the other direction,
using the Scale attribute, might help? Although this isn’t something
I’d do with movies as a matter of course.

SCALE=value (optional)

SCALE is either TOFIT, ASPECT or a number. By default the value of
SCALE is 1. If set to TOFIT, the movie is scaled to fit the embedded
box as specified by the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. If this is set
to ASPECT, the movie will scale to fit the embedded box while
maintaining the aspect ratio. If this is set with a number, the movie
will be scaled by that number (e.g. 1.5). Note: Using the number
scale attribute with a QTVR Panorama movie can degrade the
performance of the movie even on high-end systems.

 <embed
     src="sample.mov"
     width="200"
     height="240"
     scale="tofit"
 >

k

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7

Right. But the problem comes when the JavaScript code that generates
the entire object/embed code sandwich has to find out from somewhere
how large this movie is. If you don’t tell it, there’s no way for it
to know until the movie loads, at which time it will be too late. It’s
a classic race condition.

Walter

On Jun 3, 2009, at 4:58 AM, Keith Martin wrote:

I wonder whether working with the problem from the other direction,
using the Scale attribute, might help? Although this isn’t something
I’d do with movies as a matter of course.

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8

If you don’t tell it, there’s no way for it to know until the movie loads

Ahh, got it. I was thinking from entirely the other direction: making
the movie fit to a box rather than making the box fit the movie.

k

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9

Hi Walter,
Would it be worth the action sniffing for the natural bounds of the
movie and writing this into the page code so that it could be read by
the Lightbox functions?
There may be a way to get the bounds of a movie directly (without
opening it first - possibly from the file’s header) but here is a
simple AppleScript that will extract the details for you;

set a to choose file
tell application "QuickTime Player"
	launch --prevents QuickTime Player opening the default 'Welcome to  
QT' window
	open a
	set {the_height, the_width} to dimensions of document 1
	close document 1
end tell
display dialog (the_height & "x" & the_width) as string

Regards,
Tim.

On 3 Jun 2009, at 05:47, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

Right. But the problem comes when the JavaScript code that generates
the entire object/embed code sandwich has to find out from somewhere
how large this movie is. If you don’t tell it, there’s no way for it
to know until the movie loads, at which time it will be too late.
It’s a classic race condition.

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10

Thanks, that might fit nicely into the approach I was going to take. I
want to rename the source file to ‘birthday_640_480_controller.mov’ or
something like that, and then I can hack lightwindow to look for that
sort of signal in the filename. Another approach I’m looking at is
using the rev attribute on the A tag to signal that same information.
Either way, the problem is getting the dimensions from the movie
without having to place the movie on the page.

Walter

On Jun 6, 2009, at 3:28 AM, Tim Plumb wrote:

Hi Walter,
Would it be worth the action sniffing for the natural bounds of the
movie and writing this into the page code so that it could be read
by the Lightbox functions?
There may be a way to get the bounds of a movie directly (without
opening it first - possibly from the file’s header) but here is a
simple AppleScript that will extract the details for you;

set a to choose file
tell application "QuickTime Player"
	launch --prevents QuickTime Player opening the default 'Welcome to  
QT' window
	open a
	set {the_height, the_width} to dimensions of document 1
	close document 1
end tell
display dialog (the_height & "x" & the_width) as string

Regards,
Tim.

On 3 Jun 2009, at 05:47, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

Right. But the problem comes when the JavaScript code that
generates the entire object/embed code sandwich has to find out
from somewhere how large this movie is. If you don’t tell it,
there’s no way for it to know until the movie loads, at which time
it will be too late. It’s a classic race condition.

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