TimeLiner
Wouldn't it be great if you could leave a message about something in a movie or some music as it happens?
TimeLiner is a small widget you can add to your blog or website for playing audio or video. Ok... Nothing special here (except it's a reallly goood flash-player)
It acts like a forum, but with a little twist; the messages that visitor post are
linked to the corresponding timeline in a (flv)movie or mp3-file. When someone plays back the file reactions will appear at the timeline they were stored at... It's a kind of
3D-forum!.
Imagine: you're watching some video on a blog, and at 1:21, just for a second, a flying saucer appears..... Now, that's probably something you'd really like to respond to,
so you press "react to this timeline" and add your reaction: "Hey did you see that ?? ".
If another visitor plays this movie and reaches 1:21 your message will appear underneath the player!
Demo
Enough talk; scroll down a bit and start the movie:
More examples?
Check out Timeliner with audio-only, a playlist, images (from my friend Willem's amazing Flickr RSS).I'm in the middle of rewriting the widget-generator to allow more configuration-options, hope to release it the 1st week of july.
How do you get it?
Widget
The easy way: if you're lazy, do not have a webserver with PHP and Mysql or any knowlegde of programming, use the widget-generator. It creates some HTML-code for you which you can copy to you webpage. I-V-O will take care of the messaging and hosting of scripts.
Take me to the widget-generator
DIY: download the source and install it on your server.
There are 2 different ways to do this; you can use Timeliner-as-a-service; you implement the HTML & scripts yourself and use a I-V-O-webserver for storing messages.
Or for the real nerds: you implement it yourself, and use your own webserver to store messages.
Take me to the download-page
User-code
If you do not use the widget or your own PHP-webserver you need a User-code. This is to distinguish your media-files from others. I do not want your email-adress, you won't need to enter a password, just press a button and you'll get a code to use in your scripts.
Give me a code!
Discuss
Discuss TimeLiner on my blog.If there's any need for it I'll open up a forum later.
Technical info
TimeLiner uses Prototype.js, Scriptaculous, the Flash player from Jeroen Wijering, authenticatedJsonProxy.js and EventStack.js ( both by me and not yet released)The script retrieves messages using (authenticated) cross-domain javascript-remoting from an I-V-O server when the player starts playing, and checks for messages each 5 seconds (I'm considering raising this to 10 seconds).
I'm not quite sure if retrieving messages just once is enough, maybe i'll put an periodicalExecute from Prototype on it, this will reduce the amount of data the browser receives at once, but would also increase the server-load (which I do not like :-) ).
Mailinglist
If you'd like to get updated on new features, subscribe to our mailing-list.If you appreciate my efforts and want to keep me going developing new features for TimeLiner, consider making a donation:
TimeLiner makes use of Prototype.js, Scriptaculous and Jeroen Wijering's FLV-media player. Consider making a donation to them for their excellent work.. they will like you for it;)
Changelog
- 01-july-08 0.02: updated the script a bit, there was some bug with event-handling. Downloads are updated.
Disclaimer
Timeliner is still ALPHA.. bugs will appear and maybe your browser can't handle the bleeding-edge techniques ;) ... Use it on your own riskI've tested Timeliner on Firefox 2, 3, MSIE7 and Safari 3 without any problems (so far). It looks like Timeliner works on MSIE 6
If you encounter any bugs, have a question or just want to yell "eureka" please use the micro-forum on my blog.