[WG: Sakai QA] request for help QAing Lessons for 2.9.3

Hedrick Charles hedrick at rutgers.edu
Mon Jun 24 18:49:05 PDT 2013


Unfortunately there has been a slow degradation of multimedia support over time, due to changes in both browser and Sakai environments. I hadn't personally tested it on a range of devices recently. Without LSNBLDR-216, Windows 8 in native mode won't play MP4 in Lessons. In the current code it will try to use a Flash player. But Windows 8 native mode will only allow Flash if you're on a MS whitelist. This is worse than not having Flash at all, since if they didn't have Flash you cpuld download it from Adobe. They have Flash, but it's broken. It doesn't do the friendly thing and pretend it had never heard of Flash, as the iPhone used to do (but no longer does). That would cause it to fall back to the nested <OBJECT>. LSNBLDR-216 uses HTML5 and works just fine.

I've tried the full set of media types on Firefox (4/Mac, current/WIndows and current/Mac worked, 2/Windows and 7/Windows didn't get the Flash MP4 player right), Chrome current/Mac, Safari current/Mac, and IE back to IE7 on Vista. the main testing issue is portable devices, but those don't work now anyway. It might also be worth trying old versions of Safari and Firefox


On Jun 24, 2013, at 6:54:39 PM, Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com> wrote:

> FYI these modifications are borderline against the policy of the maintenance branch. I realise they are improvements but at some point this needs to be reigned in otherwise I can see major regressions creeping through and into a release.
> 
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TCC/Maintenance+Branch+Merge+Policy
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 6:11 AM, Neal Caidin <neal.caidin at apereo.org> wrote:
> Okay, so for sure we will need cross-browser testing on this. Tight timeline! Yeek. :-)
> 
> -- Neal
> 
> On Jun 24, 2013, at 4:08 PM, Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure. The nice thing about HTML5 is that it provides a way for me to ask whether the browser supports a given type. What worries me is that the answer is usually "maybe" or "possibly". But I've tested Safari, Firefox, Chrome and IE on a variety of types, and not had HTML5 claim to do something that it later fails to do. So at the moment HTML5 looks safe.
> >
> > On Jun 24, 2013, at 4:02 PM, Neal Caidin <neal.caidin at apereo.org> wrote:
> >
> >> What is most likely to break with HTML 5 ?  We should test that first, whatever it is.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Neal
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> sakai-qa mailing list
> >>> sakai-qa at collab.sakaiproject.org
> >>> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-qa
> >>>
> >>> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to sakai-qa-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"
> >>
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
> sakai-qa mailing list
> sakai-qa at collab.sakaiproject.org
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-qa
> 
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to sakai-qa-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-qa/attachments/20130624/c25a9431/attachment.html 


More information about the sakai-qa mailing list