[Building Sakai] Does anyone participate in CKEditor community? Embed media plugin support for iOS (HTML5)

[Keli Sato Amann]

Hi
I was reading the thread on Lessons QA for 2.9.3 from June (below) and it seems Charles and crew are making progress making sure that video/audio inserted via "Add Multimedia" button will playback on just about any browser through use of html5, strobe, and fall backs for IE.

However, I am wondering if anyone has given any thought to how we might address video inserted with the embed media plug in is handled *within* CKEditor. This clapper icon inserts your uploaded (or URL based) video into Strobe player, which is Flash based and thus won't play back at all on iOS (SAK-23075). At this point, I think the only safe thing to do for all platforms is to not embed and just link, but that isn't very slick.

I read about a separate HTML5 video plugin but the developer indicated he was not going to work on it anymore because he thought it would be supported by CKEditor 4; I haven't found any evidence of that online, however--not true of the CKEditor 4.1.3 currently in trunk.

Really, we don't want a separate plugin for this anyway--it would be great if the current plugin had a way of presenting video (youtube mainly) to iOS users. On our campus, nearly everyone has a mobile phone device in addition to a laptop and our registration numbers indicate that just over 80% of those devices are iOS.

I am not a developer so I'm just wondering if anyone has thought about this. It seems like either every tool using CKEditor would either have to also develop a separate way of adding media (including links to YouTube) so that it appear embedded in the page (though it will be below, not inline with rest of text), or we can try to influence CKEditor's Media Embed plug in creator to support this--if they won't add HTML5 support, at least insert alternate text with instructions and maybe a link for iOS viewers. Does anyone already participate in the CKEditor forums who can ask the question?

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University



----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Charles Hedrick" <hedrick at rutgers.edu>
To: "sakai-qa at collab.sakaiproject.org QA" <sakai-qa at collab.sakaiproject.org>, "sakai-dev Dev" <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 1:06:39 PM
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] request for help QAing Lessons for 2.9.3

In case it isn't obvious:

The reason I originally started using Strobe was because at the time there was a lot of variation in what browsers supported, and we didn't want to assume that users had installed plugins. Hence using a Flash player for the common types made sense. That also gave support for FLV, which requires a Flash player.

At this point, builtin support is a lot better. For the moment I've putting Strobe before the <OBJECT> tag, pretty much for historical reasons, and because I still want to minimize support for loading plugins. As things improve it might make sense to back off of using Strobe except for FLV. Sites can do that themselves by specifying an empty list for MP4 types.

I assume people agree that using HTML5 for types that it supports make sense.

In general, we strongly recommend using MP4 for video. We typically tell them to post-process it with a tool that optimizes for progressive download on both desktop and portable devices.



On Jun 24, 2013, at 3:59 PM, Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu> wrote:

> I should note that I just updated audio support as well. It seems silly to do HTML5 for video and not audio.
> 
> Audio approach is:
> 
> HTML5 if the browser claims to support it for mp3, ogg and wav
> Strobe for mp3
> fall back to <OBJECT> or [for IE] <EMBED>
> 
> That should be tested as well.
> 
> For both video and audio, the installation can control which players we try for which mime types.
> 
> This code is based entirely on MIME types, since as far as I know, Sakai uses them correctly. If for some reason there's a file that doesn't have any MIME type, <OBJECT> or <EMBED> is the only thing we try.
> 
> 
> On Jun 23, 2013, at 12:14 PM, Hedrick Charles <hedrick at rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 2.9.3 is coming up very quickly. I'd appreciate any help in QA'ing the copy of Lessons that will come with it. A couple of changes have turned out to involve a lot more code that I had expected.
>> 
>> * In 2.9.1 Gradebook made a change so that any tool that uses Gradebook must implement a new API. Lessons did not. As a result, grades reported by Lessons were not shown to students, and probably were not included in final grade calculations. The same would be true of any contrib tools that had not been updated to implement the new API. I've fixed that. The code needs testing. Specifically it needs testing for graded comments, student content, and comments on student content, and it needs testing specifically when those items are limited to be accessible to specific groups (to the extent that that restriction is possible -- not all of them are group-aware).
>> 
>> * I had a report that MP4 video was not showing on the iPhone. That resulted in LSNBLDR-216. Initially I thought upgrading the player would fix it. However the problem turned out to be in the implementation of /access/lessonbuilder. In the process I fixed several issues: HTML5 is now used to display MP4, webm and ogg, if the browser supports HTML5 and it claims to support the MIME type for the video. Otherwise I next try the Strobe Flash-based player. Finally I use <OBJECT> or <EMBED>, which leaves it to the browser to find a player.  JWPlayer is no longer supported, for licensing reasons. (And the initially reason for using it no longer applies anyway.) I also fixed an issue that caused Quicktime embedding not to work (for browsers that have a Quicktime player, of course). Testing should include MP4, FLV, Quicktime, and if possible webm, ogg, and random types not explicitly supported. Please try as many different browsers as possible, including portable devices.
>> 
>> * I have simplified the build process. You now adjudge the <parent> declaration in the main pom.xml, and choose a profile for 2.8, 2.9, or 2.10. If you want support for contrib tools you enable the optional profile in tool/pom.xml. The build has been tested on 2.8. (Trunk has also been tested on 2.8.)
>> 
>> Note that there are database updates for moving to 2.9.2 and 2.9.3, both defined in files simplepage.for-2.9.[23].sql. There's also a script if you're moving from a pre-2.9 version of Lessons.
>> 
>> For multimedia tests, you may want to use sakai-29.rutgers.edu. It is running he current 1.4.x, and is a two-node cluster. Some of the code should be tested on a cluster.
>> 
> 

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