09 Jan 2014

Dynamic Duration and Popcorn Maker

Small post, but wanted to bring to the attention of anyone who reads this that actually uses Mozilla's Popcorn Maker that I just recently landed a long over due feature/performance fix being dubbed Dynamic Duration!

What exactly is Dynamic Duration?

Good question! Previously whenever changes needed to be made to the base timeline's length ( a Null Video using Popcorn.js ) we would essentially have to destroy the tracking popcorn instance and recreate it with a base media that had a sufficient duration. This was really awful for performance because any trackevents that required AJAX calls of any sort would have to be redone because events were being recreated just so the project could be in it's previous state data wise. It was annoying/noticable enough for people who have good connections but was at a near "game stopper" for anyone who didn't have a great connection because it would be such a strain on network performance. On top of that there was a somewhat anoying UI quirk of seeing the timeline briefly hide itself only to almost instantly reappear.

As of today however, these are problems of the past! Hooray for performance increases. Please file bugs if you notice any issues!

- Tagged in Webmaker, Popcorn Maker, and Popcorn.js.