Lots of frustrating time “wasted” yesterday trying to get embed.ly software to work in some kind of reasonable use case. There is a demo I ended up focusing on trying to reproduce as a starting case. The online demo features the same Vimeo video in two forms that embed.ly returns to their client requests: the “iframe” form and the card form. The demo shows a “play” button above two embeds of the video. When it is loaded, the videos are not playing. When the button is pressed, both videos start playing. After that, they have to be manually controlled as far as the demo goes. So it’s a real base case of controlling 3rd party domain player without a special API (e.g. not YouTube). The demo runs for me in the way that embed.ly hosts it on the web, but all attempts at creating a standalone file version of the demo failed. Why? I’m not sure…frustration…but looking into it, I’m skeptical of the engineering design of the demo. What is supposed to happen in the way they have it set up is that somehow JQuery will initialize and register for all browser ready events, embed.ly javascript will register a callback with JQuery to get ready events for IFrames with particular embed.ly tags attached, these events will be caught and used to given embed.ly javascript handles to the particular IFrames that it wants to control, & somewhere other info from the way the Vimeo link is setup will tell it that there is a Vimeo player in the Iframe which agrees to listen to message protocol requests of a certain type from the outside and respond. The play button is supposed to send the correct request.

That’s a complicated set of connections & timings. Running on my machine in different domains is not going to be like running in Fiddler connecting to embed.ly at different times, even if I actually get the same set of libs…the timing of the initializations matters. They should provide a single file version that words at 3rd party sites to show it isn’t a problem with the design.

Independently of that, I realized that the Vimeo library I was looking at the other day and having partial success with in terms of controlling play start was actually created by Vimeo’s developers and they have a sophisticated demo attached: https://player.vimeo.com/api/demo

Unfortunately, the demo is hosted by Vimeo.com, so one can’t be sure if all of the IFrame control works from a 3rd party domain, just based on the way they have it set up. But I do know from my other experiments that setting starting times does work. Based on the log messages in the demo, it seems that the problem I was looking at, getting the Vimeo player to pause setting the starting time, has to be addressed by either waiting long enough for it to succeed in being ready at that new time point, and then asking it to pause, or by being able to listen for the event that says it is ready at the new point, and having that trigger a pause request. Their API doesn’t currently offer an option to seek & stay paused.

Aaargh…so how to go forward? Would be best if embed.ly stuff “just worked”, but that doesn’t seem to be true. I do have a sense, from sources recently examined, that most media companies providing video are going towards players with a javascript interface that can be controlled. Do they listen to message protocol in Iframes? Does embed.ly think they do or was that kind of a wishful, forward-looking hope? If I can control the players, then at least I would have the ability to setup and control self-hosted clips with the points I wanted to make.