Video Support

[DanielCaspers]

Motivation there may be times when a still picture may not always be adequate to explain a problem to a customer.

Problems to solve for full implementation 1) Capture (browsers are finicky about accessing the rear camera live directly, but maybe we just launch the camera app and attach) 2) Upload in the right formats (could take a long time to upload the file, so special async upload (#25) would be required and need to somehow continue in the background) 3) save to the server 4) Playback for a tech (if we were to bake that in) 5) Playback for the customer 6) The user experience we want to tie it all together.

Scope of this task

• Estimate cost & hours of development
• develop wireframes for UX
• Determine if this ties us to the hardware purchased for techs in any way
• Provide thoughtful solutions to async file upload
• @YoMurphy @scaspers Determine how the video should relate to the rest of the captured inspection. Does it belong as separate notes, or should it be part of a checklist item, or be able to do both.

Advise postponement until post v1.0 launch

[DanielCaspers]

After evaluation of image capture libraries, it seems capturing a video in the same way we capture photos is gonna be available yet.

However, if libraries don't improve by the time we estimate this, we could still just launch Android camera directly and file attach the result

[DanielCaspers]

This became possible again now that we are doing file attachment. Not sure what storing video in a database looks like, but as far as the UI is concerned, its just a matter of file upload. This would require good asynchronous image upload though, so a user could continue doing other things in the app while they wait (like Google Drive).

[DanielCaspers]

If postponed until v2.0

https://nehalist.io/uploading-files-in-angular2/

http://www.bentedder.com/upload-images-angular-4-without-plugin/

[DanielCaspers]

@scaspers @YoMurphy please have techs take an example video whenever they end up in a real situation where they'd like to take one. I'd like to get a feel for the kinds of videos we'd support and what we might have to do to better address needs of the tech, customers, etc.

We can probably stop at 3 to 5 examples total since that should be a good starting point for our research

[DanielCaspers]

Hey @scaspers , sorry to be a debbie downer, but this must be pushed back until post Angular 6 migration. I am pushing back on this because even seemingly trivial features as we are getting into more dynamic, app like interactions, are taking way longer than they should be on the client.

And this is far from a trivial feature 1) Async AJAX video upload needs a good user experience for uploading while doing other things, since videos will need to be high quality (EG more than 10-20MB ) to be of value. 2) I can probably lean on independent libraries and wrappers around WebAPIs if we wait, instead of needing to use WebAPIs directly. 3) I won't have to reinvent the wheel post migration, because we'll be migrated :)

[DanielCaspers]

Made what I believe are the final required css changes tonight. New improvements can be opened as more specific tickets as needed.