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Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 20

The upload form that I had designed can be seen in figure 9. Through half of my code in the controller I got stuck. I had a
bit problem with creating thumbnails, which was one major point of the platform. What was also necessary for the videos
was the video length information. This video length was needed as a bit of extra information about the videos, and this
should be stored in the database table as well. For these 2 functionalities I needed to use the tool FFMPEG, and this was
quite an elaborate tool that consisted of many different functions and libraries. I stopped with the code for a bit, and went
back to use the library strategy: opening the official FFMPEG website, and reading through the documentation of the tool
[5].
The FFMPEG tool is a command line tool. This means that you had to set up some line of commands and this command
would be put into the tool; the tool then performed the necessary functions, and outputting the results back. The problem
however was to come up with a command line, since a command line can be set up in many different orders. Not only the
many different possible permutations of the command line, but FFMPEG also had many components each performing a
specific function in a similar but still a different way.

I thought it was best to not only use the library strategy and focus on the FFMPEG documentation. I decided to make use
of the workshop and lab strategies also; starting with a very small command line, inputting the video file. And every time
making the command line longer, adding the necessary components to achieve the desired result. This worked out the
best. After a while I had the necessary command lines to perform the actions I wanted.
Not only was the upload form finished, but a lot of the other parts of the video platform had been programmed. The
upload form was making use of categories, which meant I had to create a category table in the database, and linking the
specific videos with its categories; which meant there was need for another table, storing the links between videos and
categories. Of course a video had tags, which meant the exact same thing as for the categories.

After the upload form, I had decided to not start on the homepage but instead work on the single page view. The
homepage would only contain some blocks of videos with their thumbnails. At this point in time it was not that important.
I already had my sketch of the single page view as you could see in figure 4. Now I only had to start the programming of it.
The single page view brought 3 important parts to my to-do list: the comment field, the advertisement banners and what
video player I was going to use.

The comment and the banner functionalities
were quite easy to do. They both needed their
own special table in the database, with
respectively the important information to store
and some small part coding. I decided to start
with the comment functionality first. After
creating a table for it, the only thing left was to
make sure that the parts were coded in their
own controller file. The view file (meaning the
single page layout) was quite simple at first;
functionality was more important than
presentation. The company directors wanted
not logged in users to be able to comment and
rate videos as well, this meant I had to make
the needed changes in the database tables,
keeping track of real logged in users and
anonymous ones. Coding wise the comment
functionality went very smoothly.

Figure 10: Main description and information below a video