projekktor player future? | my fork | invitation to colaboration

[rwlodkowski]

Hello projekktor users and developers!

Long time no see...

Maybe it's already too late, but if anyone is still interested in using or developing projekktor please take a look at the current develop branch of it in my own projekktor fork:
https://github.com/fixedmachine/projekktor

I was trying to contact @frankyghost for his opinion about the future of this project but unfortunately I still have no answer :( I don't know what happened exactly that he left this project but I hope he's doing fine and I wish him all the best. I'm really thankful for his great vision of this video player and fantastic execution of this vision in the product which is still used on many sites.

I think that projekktor still has its place in the video players landscape and in my current development version is a really useful library - even in today's 'no plugin' world. It's got features which make it unique and I've added many new ones, like:

• hls.js support
• native HLS support for Safari on Mac OS, Android and iOS
• manual and automatic quality switching for adaptive streams
• live + DVR support
• better playlist support - that's really fun to play with
• amazing cuepoints system
• better platform management
• fully working and customisable fullscreen support in 3 different modes
• astronomical amount of bugfixes and small tweaks

I hope it's not the last breath of this project before it dies of abandonment. Of course I'm sure that the coding style (or lack of it) in which it was written is old and unmaintainable in the long run. There are still hidden hacks in the code to make it work for stone-age browsers or devices. There is a need to rewrite it in modern fashion from scratch or at least make a general refactoring to give projekktor a new life.

It's on GPL licence so all my work is legal and valid even without @frankyghost acceptance. Anyway I can't give anyone guarantee that it's working perfectly. For sure my changes are breaking compatibility with the last official projekktor and I've dropped support for anything below IE11.

All the development I've made was without @frankyghost revision or supervision, because I haven't had any contact with him since September 2014. I've got a collaborator access to the official projekktor repo on GitHub, but I don't feel it's fair to push or mess with it in any way without @frankyghost acceptance. For that reason I'm pushing new changes only to my forked repo. If @frankyghost contacts me and agrees to further develop this project together maybe we'll merge my changes with the official repo. I don't know. I hope it'll happen but that's all I've got for now.

I'll be happy to hear any feedback from you. Feel free to share your thoughts and have fun with the new version of projekktor.

Cheers!
Radosław Włodkowski

[henning]

My 2 cents (after stumbling into this while researching for a potential Video player to use in our Website):

If the original author is unresponsive, and you don't want to push a boatload of changes into the project that you think he might not approve (which you could say he did by giving you collaborator access, and the implication that he doesn't care anymore for the project by not answering for many months, not committing for years, not handling issue reports and PR's), to really get along with the project and avoid confusion, you might come up with a proper new name for your fork and continue the project with that new name.

Keeping the name and just handling big changes in your own fork defintely leads to confusion about what to do and use (I can tell you as a potential new user on research!).

Just an idea.

If you find it hard to decide, toss a coin. IMHO the original author has no right to complain when not saying anything for that long, and you don't do it to make a lot of money or whatever, but to keep the project alive!

Other idea: did you try to call the number given on his company website? Want me to walk over and knock at his door and ask if he's allright with these things(living oin the same city)?

[Stephan972]

http://www.projekktor.com/ seems down...

[MilenFrom]

Still down?
Looks like is dead project, no?

[lestoilfante]

@fixedmachine I'm glad you are still active on this. I used this branch for an old project and now I would like to switch to your active branch but can't see english documentation about those new features.
Also are methods used with this branch supported on your branch?
Thank you

[rwlodkowski]

Hi, @lestoilfante nice to hear that it works for you. Sorry, but I didn't had a time to document new features. If you need help just drop me a mail. Cheers!