Test new TBA feature

[Greg Marra]

Any brave website people want to test a new feature of The Blue Alliance Match Archive System?

It lets you embed your team's match videos right in your own website with a skinned player.

If you're interested, PM me and reply here :)

[SSMike]

Sounds cool but what would we have to do?

[Tottanka]

im interested in that thing too, whough no matches of my team on TBA.
Is it possible to get there an event statistics too?

[Greg Marra]

Sounds cool but what would we have to do?

To be eligible for this test, you need to have permissions to edit your team's website and be able to stick an iframe on a page somewhere. I'm going to make the feature super simplified in the future, but right now it's a bit rough so it helps if you have an understanding of HTML and such already.

Thanks!
-Greg

[Fred Sayre]

Yeah, I run an active testing website for the team and would love for a better alternative to youtube, and especially if all the archived matches from around the net were available.

[chris31]

Our website isnt used very much but I would love to embed statistics and videos from TBA on our website.

[Tim Arnold]

Count MARS in :) !

[wilsonmw04]

2106 is fleshing out our site now. we'd love to help.

[Guy Davidson]

Once we get our new website up, Team 8 would love to help test this new feature.

[synth3tk]

964 is changing our site (domain and all) completely. It'll be ready in about a month, so count me in for sure.

[fimmel]

im in for team 885's site. let me know what i have to do

[Greg Marra]

New Feature in Testing!

What is it?

The feature is an embeddable iframe that lets you put your team's videos straight on your team's website. It also lets you put just videos for one event, or (in the case you run a Regional's website) the videos from an entire event.

The iframe can be customized with your team's colors so as to best fit into your team's page! You can see it in action on The Green Team's site (http://thegreenteam885.org/) or by itself here (http://thebluealliance.net/tbatv/playlist_iframe_test.php).

How to add to your team's site!

To add it to your site, add the following code to your site where you want it to appear:

<iframe src="http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/iframe_playlist.php?frontcolor=ffcc00&backcolor=660000&lightcolor=ffff00&year=2007&team=177" frameborder="0" height="470" width="395" scrolling="no"/>

To customize it, modify the "src" property of the iframe with the colors, year, and team number that you want.
"?frontcolor=ffcc00&backcolor=660000&lightcolor=ffff00&year=2007&team=177"

Optionally, you can set event=<eventid> and it will filter for just that event. The eventid's can be found by viewing an event page on TBA and looking at the URL.

Show us it!

If anyone runs into any trouble implementing it, let me know and I will work with you to figure out what's wrong. If you do add it to your team's site, drop a link here so everyone can see your color scheme and team in action!

Thanks!

[cbale2000]

This is a great idea, I was actually thinking of getting something like this on our website for youtube videos (our video gallery was extremely lacking), but if we could do the same thing for videos from the Blue alliance, it would save us the trouble of having to upload our own in a lot of cases.

I'll talk to some of the other website designers and see if I can get this on there! :D


EDIT: I did manage to test it out on our team forums using a DoHTML tag, It gave me the player with the videos but it also had a lot of extra code showing, not sure weather that was just the forum doing that or if it's a glitch. Thought it was worth mentioning. Also, when I tried to use my team number no videos showed up on the list, I could only get it to work with the default settings.

[Jonathan Norris]

Wow great job Blue Aliance crew, I'll update our site with it soon (http://robotics.crescentschool.org). You guys are still missing some matches from GTR and Waterloo from last year that I have, contact me if you want me to upload them to you.

[synth3tk]

Minor unrelated technicalities with our site. I'll still try to test it if we get it up soon.

[Greg Marra]

EDIT: I did manage to test it out on our team forums using a DoHTML tag, It gave me the player with the videos but it also had a lot of extra code showing, not sure weather that was just the forum doing that or if it's a glitch. Thought it was worth mentioning. Also, when I tried to use my team number no videos showed up on the list, I could only get it to work with the default settings.

Unfortunately, we don't have any video from the events 703 competed at. Sorry :(. Hopefully we'll get some from events this year.

Regarding the code errors, can you be more specific? Copy and paste the extra code, attach a screen short, or send a hyperlink? I can figure out why it's not working so we can fix it for the future.

Thanks!

[cbale2000]

Unfortunately, we don't have any video from the events 703 competed at. Sorry :(. Hopefully we'll get some from events this year.

Regarding the code errors, can you be more specific? Copy and paste the extra code, attach a screen short, or send a hyperlink? I can figure out why it's not working so we can fix it for the future.

Thanks!

Thats very odd, you used to have them for our matches at the 2007 Nationals, in fact I still have some of them that I downloaded from TBA onto my PC. What happened? Someone loose them? :yikes:

Anyways, heres what I got in terms of weird code:

http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/862/tbavideofeatureyf6.th.png (http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/862/tbavideofeatureyf6.png)

Also, on our forum it seemed to cut off everything after it on the page including further posts.




Oh, and on a few totally unrelated notes:

1. TBA doesn't list our team as having competed in the finals at IRI. Yet we were the second team picked (out of the 4 team alliance) and played in every match the alliance played. Just thought I'd point that out.

2. Is there some glitch with the badge generator? I try to use the linking code it gives me but the image never appears and if I follow the images url it instead just redirects me to the main TBA page. :confused:

[fimmel]

Also, on our forum it seemed to cut off everything after it on the page including further posts.


try changing the last 2 characters to the iframe from:
/>
to:
></iframe>

that fixed cutting the rest of the page off on my site

...forest

[BenThompson]

237 has implemented it here (http://www.team237.com/2007game.html#matches). Good job TBA!

[Greg Marra]

1. TBA doesn't list our team as having competed in the finals at IRI. Yet we were the second team picked (out of the 4 team alliance) and played in every match the alliance played. Just thought I'd point that out.

The Blue Alliance System does not currently support matches with four teams per alliance, as the IRI Finals were run. If FIRST changes the official alliance system, this may be updated, but for now it is a back-burner problem.

2. Is there some glitch with the badge generator? I try to use the linking code it gives me but the image never appears and if I follow the images url it instead just redirects me to the main TBA page. :confused:

Yes, you found a problem. The link doesn't know what to do if you do not enter colors into the color fields. I will add javascript validation. In the mean time, enter a color (even if just 000000 or FFFFFF) to circumvent this issue.

try changing the last 2 characters to the iframe from:
/>
to:
></iframe>

that fixed cutting the rest of the page off on my site

I will change the code to reflect this more compatible method. Thanks. Since I can't edit my old post any more:

How to add to your team's site!

To add it to your site, add the following code to your site where you want it to appear:

<iframe src="http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/iframe_playlist.php?frontcolor=ffcc00&backcolor=660000&lightcolor=ffff00&year=2007&team=177" frameborder="0" height="470" width="395" scrolling="no"></iframe>

[ParkerF]

This is a great feature. I'll be sure to add it to the new Robowrangler site coming up.

[RyanCesiel]

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_Media_Player. x]!

I would give credit next time you do that..

[Doug G]

Really slick feature that many of us can include on our sites. But one question... How to we ADD to the video archives on TBA? I have most of the Davis-Sacramento matches from last year - I posted them to SOAP, but they couldn't keep them. Where does TBA keep them? Youtube?

[Greg Marra]

Really slick feature that many of us can include on our sites. But one question... How to we ADD to the video archives on TBA? I have most of the Davis-Sacramento matches from last year - I posted them to SOAP, but they couldn't keep them. Where does TBA keep them? Youtube?

We keep them on our own servers. I will PM you and we can get in contact and you can upload them to us so they will be available in our system :)

Thanks!

[Cow Bell Solo]

Team 2207 has implemeted this feature on our website at http://www.whitebearlakerobotics.com, it is our 2007 video section.

This is an awesome feature TBA.

[Nibbles]

try changing the last 2 characters to the iframe from:
/>
to:
></iframe>

that fixed cutting the rest of the page off on my site

...forest

I don't know why the XML tag shorthand was used, especially considering that iframes have been depreated, and the whole rest of the tag isn't valid XML anyways.

You MUST (rfc 2119 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt)) encode attributes with their entitles. This means replace the & with &amp; as shown:
<iframe src="http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/iframe_playlist.php?frontcolor=ffcc00&amp;backcolor=66 0000&amp;lightcolor=ffff00&amp;year=2007&amp;team=177" frameborder="0" height="470" width="395" scrolling="no"></iframe>

This holds for both HTML and XML.

Teams use the XHTML format, team 237 for example (http://www.team237.com/2007game.html#matches), with invalid XML (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.team237.com%2F2007game.html%2 3matches). The only reason no XML error parser errors show up is because browsers will not use an XML parser unless application/xhtml+xml is sent in the Content-type header (sending documents as text/html will make browsers use the standards mode SGML parser). Don't get me wrong, XHTML is great, I use an XSL parser to make edits to my teams website, you can't do that with plain old HTML :)

Iframes are really hackish, it would be much better to create a custom flash player that will grab the team list, instead of coding it in HTML loaded from an iframe, or link to the list of videos otherwise.