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Show HN: Dripi.com - A little web app that won a Google I/O ticket

10 points by MatthewRayfield ↗ HN
http://dripi.com

I thought I'd share my winning entry to the Google I/O last call competition with ya'll.

Took me about 9 hours, which seems like a lot looking at it now (my only excuse is that it took place after 12am). I truly did not expect to be one of the winners. My guess is that the YouTube API category had fewer entries than others.

Feel free to let me know what you think!

This was the challenge:

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a video mash-up by chaining player invocations that work for both Flash and HTML5 videos ? Well, with the JavaScript API to the <iframe> embed we think you can.

Your task is to build a mash-up player using the <iframe> JavaScript API. You will be given a list of video IDs, and from-to timestamps. For example the following sequence (<xxasdadad, 65s, 95s>, <xxffwwe22, 20s, 35s>), which will trigger the mash-up player to play video with ID xxasdadad for 30 seconds, starting at second 65 and ending at second 95, then proceed to play video with ID xxffwwe22, starting at second 20 and ending at second 35.

Given the sequence, implement a player which will play the sections of the listed videos, starting at the ‘from’ timestamp, and ending at the ‘to’ timestamp for each video.

Try to make the transitions between videos as smooth as possible, and make it easy for users to embed your mash-up player in their own web applications.

I encourage everyone to enter this contest if they hold it again next year. It was a blast!

6 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread
wcarss
Have you considered trying to hack some sort of 'double buffered' style approach to transitions? You could conceivably open a hidden player that's loading in the background while the visible one is playing, and flip between them, dumping the previously visible player's video and always buffering the next chunk in the hidden bit.

This idea has been something my friends and I discussed a lot at one time or another, it's really cool to see it in action.

MatthewRayfield
I did try something like that where I loaded all the video segments at once and hid all but the current segment with CSS. However I wasn't able to get it working how I wanted, there were still loading delays and some visual glitches when switching clips, it also was a little unreliable. After fiddling with it, trying different hiding and timing methods and not getting the results I wanted I opted for a much simpler system. But, I think that a "double buffer" system could have improved playback if I'd spent more time on it.

Thanks!

revorad
This is awesome! Is there anyway to mix more than one video in one mashup? That would be really useful to me right now.
nickconfer
really awesome idea... I think your underestimating yourself a little in thinking they didn't get many submissions. This is honestly a good idea executed well.

Congrats on winning.