Introducing ... Open Media Player

I’m very happy to announce that we have released Open Media Player (formerly called OU Media Player), as a free/open source project. It has been our intention for a while to make the code open source, and we were finally able to plan in the time to make it happen.

Why open source?

We decided to open source because:

1. Open Media Player aspires to the highest levels of accessibility, while being a mainstream player - a fairly unique proposition;

2. We adopt a service-based approach, where the player is kept separate from the audio/video files, and the web sites it is embedded in. This aids maintenance, feature roll-out and is again a unique selling point;

3. To help drive innovation;

4. Principle – it fits in with the Open University’s mission - open to people, places and ideas;

5. Educational – help others learn from our best-practices and our mistakes.

We’ve done a lot of work to make the Player straightforward to install, and hopefully understand. installation via Composer is as simple as copying and pasting this at a terminal:

    composer create-project iet-ou/open-media-player --no-dev -sdev --prefer-dist

Some of the highlights of version 2 of Open Media Player:

• New embeddable, themed YouTube player
• Configurable site layout and authentication
• Composer adopted, code-base re-factored into sub-packages
• Upgraded to MediaElement.js 2.17.0 2.18.1
• Improved player user-interface in high-contrast (ignore colours) mode

And, lots more!

Enjoy!

Visit: iet-ou.github.io/open-media-player