mediaelement.js - Play random video? - wordpress

Question

I have lots of videos in the directory "video" in my WordPress installation.
They all play nice using the MediaElement.js plugin, but is it also possible to play a random clip from this directory? For example using a shortcode that directs to the directory (and not to a specific video), something like
[video src="http://www.domain.com/wordpress/wp-content/video" random="true"]
That would be great!

Answer 1

This should be possible.
What you might want to do is use AJAX to generate the div containing your video player. If you do this, you can delete/recreate the player very easily.
After that what you'd need is a shortcode definition which feeds a directory string value and a boolean value into whichever function you attach to the shortcode handler.
For Instance
$defaultDirectory=site_url()+"/videos/";
add_shortcode( 'video', 'videoDiv' );
function videoDiv( $shortcodeAttributeList )
{
extract( shortcode_atts( array(
'src' => $defaultDirectory,
'random' => true, /*set default values, use lowercase*/
), $shortcodeAttributeList ) );
if($random)
{
$numFiles=fileCounter($src);
$choice=rand(1, $numFiles);
}
$output='<div id="videoPlayer" class="player">';
// Continue by making a string which spans from <div> to </div>
return $output; //a div
}
Also from http://php.net/manual/en/function.readdir.php
<?php
/**
* get the number of files within a given dir
*/
function fileCounter($dir){
$counter = 0;
if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
//echo "Directory handle: $handle\n";
//echo "Files:\n";
/* This is the correct way to loop over the directory. */
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
//echo "<BR>".$counter." - $file";
$counter++;
}
closedir($handle);
}
$counter -= 1; // in order to exclude '.' and '..', as well as start the counter on 1
return $counter;
}
/**
* get the filename in a giver dir, starting the first file with the index 1
*/
function fileNameByIndex($dir, $fileIndex){
$counter = 0;
if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
$counter++;
if($counter - 2 == $fileIndex)
return $file;
}
closedir($handle);
}
return "";
}
}