Audio/Video Player

1 Description

According to the following discussion in the ILIAS forums (goto_docu_frm_1881_263.html) we need to change the flash player we are using in ILIAS and integrate one that is also using the GPL or another GPL compliant license.
 
See also the related feature wiki page Cross-Browser Video.

2 Status

3 Additional Information

4 Discussion

JF 24 Jan 2011: We had a similar discussion already on this page Youtube-like start screen last year. The flow player had been mentioned as an alternative. We would highly appreciate any funding.

24.01.2011 fbischoff: The project team I'm working in on a learning module appreciates a startup picture in videos, too. Not to look into a "black hole" where there is plenty ... "Manual picture upload" would be absolutely fine. But it should definitely be a picture I can choose myself, otherwise it is useless imho. NonverBlaster Flash player (Creative Commons License BY) got a teaser image feature e. g.

21.10.2011 CB: I’m not sure if betting on Flash still is a good idea in 2011. On the web I see a (welcomed) trend away from this proprietary technology and by the time mobile devices will have learned to do Flash in way that’s acutally usable (!) it probably won’t be necessary anymore. Just my 2 ¢.

21.10.2011 DZ: Yes, flash will be completely replaced by HTML5 based video in the future. Unfortunately, browser support is inhomogenous, e.g. IE supports H.264 and Firefox doesn't, and due to the fact that older versions of the IE (V. 8 and below) are still common, a flash fallback is recommended for the next few years. Thus, ILIAS developers should consider to integrate a HTML5 video player - e.g. VideoJS - in ILIAS, which is also a prerequisite for the ability to use ILIAS on Apple mobile devices (iPhone and iPad).

JF 19 Mar 2012: We will schedule the replacement or 4.3.

Alex 21 Mar 2012: MediaElement.js currenlty seems to be the most promising solution. Stefan Born suggested this player and made some additional tests.

DZenker 21 Mar 2012: Indeed, MediaElement.js looks good. I'm wondering that MediaElement.js doesn't play OGG in the PHCH test page, since OGG is THE native HTML5 video format - Firefox, Chrome and Opera support OGG natively on all OS (could be checked here). Obviously, the mime type is specified incorrect (application/octet-stream instead of video/ogg - the same is true for WebM).

Alex 26 Mar 2012: The installation instructions at http://mediaelementjs.com/ starts with the mime type setup in .htaccess. Maybe they just skipped this step.

stefanborn 27 Mar 2012: We would highly appreciate if there could be uploaded a preview image for the video. This gives the page a better usability if there are multiple videos on it. This feature will be implemented in Mediacast objects (see Mediacast: Preview Picture) and we'd like to see it here as well if possible. MediaElement.js does support this too.
 
@DZenker: Our mime types are correct, but the class 'ilMimeTypeUtil' in ILIAS doesn't evaluate the mime types correctly because ogv and webm aren't in the mime type list. Nevertheless MediaElement.js does not support OGG Video yet (please have a look in the "Version History - Proposed Features" section on the MediaElement.js GitHub page.

Caspar 28 Mar 2012: The preview image that Stefan has mentioned is essential for our learning objects. We have already hundreds of video clips. For each one we have created a unique "first frame image" that contains a image, a title and other information. These preview images/titels not only improve the usabiltity but make the videos more inviting for the learner to click. (Imagine all video-pages of a learning object containing only black rectangles. This would look rather boring)

5 Implementation

AK 5 Sep 2012: mediaelement.js is now integrated into ILIAS. The preview pictures are at least implemented for mediacasts. We plan to do more UI improvements during beta. Please start to test your scenarios.