[Building Sakai] video players

[Adam Marshall]

have you looked at jplayer.org? There's no nice skin but that could be fixed?

adam
________________________________________
From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] on behalf of Hedrick Charles [hedrick at rutgers.edu]
Sent: 22 June 2013 17:05
To: Neal Caidin
Cc: sakai-dev Dev
Subject: [Building Sakai] video players

Because of licensing questions about JW player, I have just removed it. However for 2.9.3, if a site has enabled JWplayer I will still support it. They will just have to supply their own copy. The README says where to put the files. For 2.10, I have removed support for JW player.

For 2.9.3, I'm simply using Strobe instead. For MP4 that will try Strobe, and backup to <OBJECT> for systems that don't have flash, e.g. iPhone. Since 2.9.3 is close, I didn't want to make major changes in approach. Strobe is MIT license. It should be equivalent to JWplayer, except that it require Flash 10 instead of Flash 9, which I think is not an issue at this point.

For 2.10, I have removed JWplayer, but added HTML5 video.

This turns out not to be so easy. The video tag allows backup, e.g.

<video>
  <object>
     <embed>
  </object>
</video>

However I found that FIrefox's video tag generated an error when it couldn't find an MP4 player, rather than falling through to the backup. Thus I use Javascript to ask the HTML5 player whether it can handle the MIME type. If so I use HTML5 otherwise the current strategy, which is Strobe, with <OBJECT> if Flash isn't there.

For types that Strobe doesn't handle, it's just <video> if applicable, followed by <object>

Without lots of browser-dependent code (that will change rapidly), this is about the best I can do. It should certainly handle the common cases correctly.

One policy decision is how to handle Quicktime. Strobe claims to handle MOV files. However I feel safer to use an actual Quicktime player. A site can configure things to let Strobe handle Quicktime by adding the MIME types to the MP4 list.

I did try video.js, but I found it unpredictable. I didn't see much advantage over the combination of HTML5 and Strobe.

Basically I expect that in the long run HTML5 will take over except for FLV video, where there's no obvious way to avoid a Flash player. Strobe has the advantage of being Adobe's own player.

It might be worth QAing both 2.9.x and trunk. It's possible that I'd be better to move to HTML5 immediately even for 2.9.3.


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