I am the developer of HTML5 AV Manager and HTML5 Multimedia Framework so the review should be mostly unbiased and should not involve pissing off other plugin developers not that I do anyway. They are both WordPress plugins btw.
Okay I start off with the HTML5 Multimedia Framework, the project started with intention of making the most flexible video plugin that will hopefully benefit theme designers, at least I thought I was building a flexible video plugin but as I started putting more features into the plugin the more complex the plugin got, the code got more sloppy, it became harder to maintain.
The Fact that the plugin use WP Embed and tries to determine the different between audio and video, that actually adds more complexity, file extension such as Ogg, MP4 and WebM can be used for video and audio, but sometime it used to store only audio. This is not the case with HTML5 AV Manager the users have to define audio or video for themselves.
Code behind HTML5 Multimedia Framework was so poor, that the presentation was actually mixed with the business logic, so the design pattern was poor. With HTML5 AV Manager, the product follows two tried and tested design pattern the Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Object-Relation-Mapping (ORM), the ORM is the model part of the MVC.
The Model is responsible for data storage, the View is responsible for presentation, by presentation in Web Development term I mean HTML Code and JavaScript, in PHP they are usually stored as files rather than an object and the Controller is responsible for the business logic.
The ORM is when I map the entity (table) to a (static) class, the tuple (record or row) to an object and an attributes (fields) to the properties.
Also I have allowed users control of some of the views and can be edited via the WordPress Theme editor, the views covers every aspect of html audio and video.
Yes I did have a ridiculous amount of commit with HTML5 AV Manager, but neither the less the code was very easy to maintain and why? Because I followed tried and tested design patterns! Sadly there are a lot of Web Developers that don’t follow tried and tested design patterns; I was guilty of that with HTML5 Multimedia Framework.
HTML5 AV Manager is available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html5avmanager/
