888368 - Consider making the base media's duration dynamic

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: Popcorn Maker, defect)

Description

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

The idea here would be the media's duration auto expands to whatever the last track event's end time is.

So, If I deleted the last track event, it would then shrink the media's duration to the end of the next last track event.

Consider how do users create new events that are going to increase the project's duration?
Consider what to display if no track events exist.

We've talked about this before.

Comment 1

[Matthew Schranz [:mjschranz]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/pull/111

This is just a quick way to play with the idea.

There's basically two problems:
1) It isn't obvious how to increase project duration (IE, the controls in the media editor).
2) If someone does know this, increases it and then starts removing track events this auto adjust would kick in probably when they wouldn't want it.

The first point isn't a huge deal in the sense that it doesn't create difficult problems programatically. The second point kind of sucks.

Also, wanted to copy this in from an etherpad.

"Solve project duration UX issue. RIght now projects are being published that seem much longer than they actually are because users don't know where to find project duration and it doesn't auto adjust."

Comment 2

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

What makes this hard is adjusting the time requires popcorn to rebuild.

I think you're patch is going to do this too, but it looks like it was more to get a feel for what it should feel like?

If we really want to tackle this, we can fix the root of the issue and make popcorn itself allow dynamic duration changes (or the wrappers, not sure where the issue is, if it is in fact still an issue)

From here it becomes an issue of UX and UI.

I'm going to play around with your patch now though.

Comment 3

[Matthew Schranz [:mjschranz]]

I agree, we need dynamic duration.

I had a patch to allow for this a couple months back with the NullWrapper but people seemed to shoot it down because it made the NullWrapper not HTML5 spec. Really though, there isn't any other way. Like you say, this forces us to teardown popcorn each time and that really sucks though.

Comment 4

[Matthew Schranz [:mjschranz]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/pull/125

Here's it doing the same thing but only trimming on project save.

I think this is the right solution, but still would benefit greatly from having dynamic duration on our NullWrapper.

Comment 5

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Comment on attachment 779192 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/pull/125

It's an interesting solution, but I'm not sure how obvious it is.

It was pretty weird saving it and seeing my timeline trim. It looked more like my track event grew, but not sure if is feels the same in a real situation.

UX aside, there are bugs and I commented in the pull request.

Comment 6

[Matthew Schranz [:mjschranz]]

Comment on attachment 779192 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/pull/125

Fixed up the bugs.

At this point, I think we in general need some better loader UI that this could piggy back off of. However, there's not much we can do about things expanding. That's just the nature of the beast. We can hide it/not be so sudden with better loading/throbber UI.

Comment 7

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Comment on attachment 779192 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/pull/125

Yeah, fine with me.

Comment 8

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org

https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/commit/f86761733e4c32ecd06c81682be4df5762bd8b24
Fix Bug 888368 - Trim project duration on save to prevent extra duration 'whitespace'.