Question

Okay I decided to improve on what I am asking for help with verse just opening a new question on this. I believe I can accomplish the below if I know of a way that when a client submits a form on my Rails app a cron job is run, where the time for the cron job is selected by the user from a drop down menu. Is there a way to do this, I have been googling around for ideas but haven’t found one.

Old Question

I am attempting to develop a system that would allow a user to upload a movie to my site and then have it played back at a certain time. The movies would be continuously streamed, so that at a certain time say after an hour, the next movie in the queue would play. I am wondering is there a gem or script that already does this? Or what is the best way to go about doing it, I thought doing it with jobs like cron or delayed-job, but I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to do this. Any advice would be appreciated.

p.s. I think a simplier way to explain it is, on YouTube you can queue up videos to be played, so could one do something similiar in rails, this would help towards my problem.

Answer 1

If the user gets to decide the exact time of playback, you could use the rufus-scheduler gem.

Plug in your Time obtained from the user like so:

scheduler = Rufus::Scheduler.start_new
scheduler.at @user_defined_time do
   some_method
end

Your some_method could work in tandem with a socket.io wrapper like Juggernaut, which would send a message to the user’s browser, which would execute some JS that would fetch the video and play it.

What you could do with this is basically sit around with your browser window open, and when the scheduled time is reached, the browser would fetch the appropriate video and play it.

If you need to implement a video queueing system, you could just enable users to queue up the videos they want to by ID, and then call the next video in the queue via means for a callback function which is triggered when the video has ended. The callback would query the database for the next video in the queue, fetch the video, and play it.