dbp / dnplayer

A simple player for Democracy Now! that remembers where you are.

About

This is a really simple video player for the news program Democracy Now!. It always plays the most recent day's show, and will remember where you are. It can synchronize this across devices; you just have to visit the url of the player you create at least once on each device. A demo of this is running at lab.dbpmail.net/dn.

Install

The backend is written with Ur/Web, with one minor patch to add support for different tags[1]; if you install it, and sqlite, you should be able to build it using the Makefile. Populate the sqlite database with sqlite3 dn.db < dn.sql and you should be able to start it with ./dn.exe. The only target in the Makefile you will need to change is deploy, for obvious reasons. And if you don't want to depend upon my server being up, or want to change the javascript, you might want to host the .js file on your own, and change the script declarations in the .urp files.

1. We need <code> and <meta> tags. If you edit lib/ur/basis.urs, add these lines:

   val meta : unit -> tag [Nam = string, Content = string] head [] [] []

   val code : bodyTag boxAttrs

Compatibility

Right now, the most stable target is Chrome (on computers). It works on iPhones/iPads and Chrome on Android, but there may be a timing bug on slow connections. Firefox doesn't work because it doesn't support the (proprietary) formats that DN! provides, and I haven't wired up a Flash fallback (yes, I've tried JW Player, MediaElement, and Video.js. All were buggy / didn't support in a browser agnostic way what I needed - it seems that until HTML5 video/audio stabilizes, the only way is to target browsers by hand).

Bugs

Sort of a decision rather than a true bug, but to simplify the problem of certain browsers (I'm looking at you, mobile) having strange policies about seeking (both when they allow it, and when the seeked time is reflected in the currentTime), the backend only increases the offset it records (unless you are starting on a new day, of course). This means that if you seek backwards manually in the show, this will not be reflected if you reload or open it in another browser. Since this is most likely a real edge case (most people watch sequentially, and if they do seek back, it is to listen to what was just played, and won't likely switch devices / reload before they reach their old position), and the issue of a mobile browser resetting the offset to 0 because the currentTime hasn't been updated (though it should have been) is a big problem and something that would be noticed every time it happened, I think this is justified. But, really, it is a bug.

Future/Todo

• Figure out a fallback for browsers that don't support MP4/MP3 (ie, firefox).