The Wikimedia Player is a tool that allows you to playback Ogg audio and video samples on the various wikimedia websites. It was created by User:Gmaxwell and it's basically PHP to do the wikimedia specific stuff, HTML, Javascript and CSS. For the actual playback it can use a JAVA player (Cortado), VLC media player, the HTML5 <video>-tag, or any other embedded player that supports Ogg.

When this versions was released I noticed some problems with VLC detection, and also so the potential for a whole lot of more features for this page. I asked Gmaxwell if I could help out, and he said he welcomed any help.

• Try the player
• Commons video template
• en.Wikipedia video template
• Commons listen template
• en.Wikipedia listen template
• mw:Extension:Player from

There were several things I wanted to fix. My primary goals were:

1. player independence
2. fix player detection
3. add controls for the VLC plugin

You can see the primary result of this in the screenshot to the right, and you can test a demo sample on one of these links.

• development on primary site
• stable dev on backup site

My current development version supports:

1. in order of preference and detection: <video>-tag, VLC media player, any generic embedded player, JAVA playback trough Cortado.
2. Play and Pause control for <video>
3. Play/pause, full screen, time/length, position slider for VLC media player.
4. Heavily refactored CSS/JS/HTML
5. Uses a JS slider by Erik Arvidsson of WebFX [1] licensed under Apache SL 2.0

This development is tested and confirmed to work with:

• Safari 2.0: VLC plugin and JAVA applet
• Firefox 2.0: Mac and Windows, VLC plugin, JAVA applet
• Opera 9.2: Windows, VLC plugin, JAVA plugin
• Opera 9.2 Video demo: Windows <video>-tag support
• IE 6.0: VLC ActiveX, Java applet

I could really use someone with IE 7.0 to test the player as well. Please leave a message if you want to help. If you have another browser that you would like to help test etc, the same goes for you of course :D

I'm not done by a long shot :D Some stuff I'd still like to work on

• I would love to have a genuine designed controller for the player. The currently implemented buttons will work, but a design such as the YouTube or Google Video players have would be much nicer. If you can assist in designing this, PLEASE CONTACT ME
• A volume slider (need smaller graphics for that)
• Add a special flag to the templates that tells the player to operate in audio or in video mode..
• Allow it to work with all wikimedia sites
• Add cookie/JS preferences for preferred player, preferred playback size, aspect ratio
• Add a "open in standalone player" link specific to you "preferred player". This requires PHP to set a specific content-type + mime for the file.
• Credentials and licenses page.
• Add support for more embedded players.

Some stuff I need to remember because it could be useful

• Apple's plugin detection scripts
• scripted WM controls
• embedding QT
• embedding WM
• VLC embedding+control demo