acorn-player

about

acorn-player is a media player that plays acorns, web media remixes expressed in JSON. acorn-player is used by Acorn, a web-service that hosts and displays acorns.

Acorn is great for all sorts of media-related things, like:

• remixing
• clipping
• looping
• playlists
• galleries
• versioning (soon)
• annotating (soon)
• scoping comments (soon)

Check out the project's github page: http://github.com/athenalabs/acorn-player

authors

acorn-player was written by Athena members:

• Juan Batiz-Benet
• Ali Yahya
• Daniel Windham

contact

Please report issues and provide feedback on the github issues page: http://github.com/athenalabs/acorn-player/issues

Pull-requests welcome!

Development

To develop acorn-player, you need to:

Download the source:

git clone git@github.com:athenalabs/acorn-player.git

Build it

npm install
make

Run a server with the following command:

cd acorn-player
make watch

See it at http://localhost:8000/static/player.html

Usage

acorn-player can be added to any webpage to play acorns, whether that acorn is loaded from the Acorn service (using an acornid), or from acorn data directly (using the JSON representation).

Beyond playing acorns, acorn-player is a great tool to embed all sorts of media on webpages. It features support for diverse kinds: video, text, pdfs, images, etc. It also has the full power of all acorns, allowing remixing and combining the media. In fact, this use gave birth to all of acorn: we wanted a library that could translate any link into the proper embeded media.

To use acorn-player, you need to

• include acorn.player.min.js and acorn.player.css
• create an acorn for the media you want to play (via acorn service or just the raw JSON data)
• tell the acorn-player to play the acorn (via acornid or data).

Code examples

constructing, loading, and saving acorn models

// construct new acorn with any link
var acornModel = acorn('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc');

// construct new acorn via data (equivalent to above)
acornModel = acorn({
  "acornid": "new",
  "shell": {
    "shell": "acorn.YouTubeShell",
    "link": "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc",
  },
});

// save acorn to the acorn service
acornModel.save();

// load acorn stored in the acorn service
acornModel = acorn('nyfskeqlyx');
acornModel.fetch({
  success: function() {
    // acornModel finished loading.
  }
});

construct + play player

// with given acorn model
var player = new acorn.player.Player({ model: acornModel });

// with given acorn model
player = new acorn.player.Player({ data: 'nyfskeqlyx' });
player.model.fetch();

// with given acorn model
link = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc';
player = new acorn.player.Player({ data: link });

// append player to selector
player.appendTo('body');

Shells

acorn-player uses a set of modules dubbed shells to support:

• typed of media
• remixing and editing
• playlists and other groupings

Shells are self-contained modules that tell acorn-player how to render a particular type of acorn, and how to edit the data with in that acorn.

See docs/shells.md.