[Building Sakai] video players

[Charles Hedrick]

No, but the way I'm using it I don't see much reason to use a separate player. I think HTML5 with a Flash fallback is a reasonable approach, that fits with the way the industry is going.

On Jun 22, 2013, at 4:00 PM, Adam Marshall <adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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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