As the guy who made over 200 definitions for the AME (Auto Media Embedding) system that The Geek designed, and who is likely going to have to pick up the product's development, I have a few questions/comments on this functionality.
First, let me ask about your first video where you create a function call to get the media ID for MegaVideo. The problem I often ran into with AME, was I often ran into websites where the media ID was on a completely separate webpage than where the video was. MiniClip, for example, was like MegaVideo. The relavant ID number was in the Embed HTML, but not anywhere in the URL string. That wouldn't have been a problem otherwise, since AME has an Extraction RegEx feature where I could match anything I wanted from the target HTML page. The problem with sites like MiniClip was that the Embed HTML was not on the target page. It wasn't even in the flashvars, like it was with Megavido. It was in a pop up window on a completely different page. If I'm understanding your video correctly, I should be able to target another page to extract the media ID I need to make that functional, presuming the extraction page's URL is something I can also do a RegEx match to, correct?
Another question I have is with regard to what I think made AME so popular. Importable/Exportable definitions. Yes, regardless of the folks in this thread who do and don't get that auto-embedding is one of the most hassle free,
don't-even-have-to-tell-your-users-it-even-exists abilities their forum could ever have, the one thing that kept it popular was the ability for the community to share websites they had made themselves. Now, I made probably 80-90% of the existing definitions, excluding one's others had made and I had to remake as websites CONSTANTLY changed over time (I'm looking at you EASports.com), but the fact that the community could share and exchange definitions, even when I had to dissapear for a six months at a time, is what kept the modification hugely popular. Even now, I've got folks cheering me on to make more of these. Will BBCode media have any functionality like this?
Also, will this still be workable for websites who provide their embed code as a JavaScript function?
And as a suggestion, the styling options of AME (2.5, anyway) were also an underused and underdeveloped ability. Rather than a simple link below the video (which it can do) the default ability is a container that can be toggled on or off, where the video appears in a box with a header that uses vB's
tcat class (your category colors). People can turn the container off, or restyle the container via templates. I think the ability to restyle the templates was a fantastic feature, but underused because it wasn't part of the core styling. I often had to adjust things for people, because their custom skin wasn't made for it. What a more likely to be used feature it would be, if it was a core feature. Meaning, developers designing skins would have to account for it. Meaning another great looking aspect for xenForo with some great potential extensibility. I can't tell you how many times people wanted me, even though I wasn't the developer, to add lightbox capability, or AJAX, or to open in a pop up window, or to summon cats upon activation, or...well, you get the idea.
I will very likely have a xenForo license around early 2012, barring the off famine, flood or pestilence. So I'd be very interested in developing BBCodes for websites much like I did with AME, if possible. And I know I'll want to extend my own website, either way.
Oh yeah, videos probably shouldn't embed when quoted.
