Embedded videos showing as 0 length

Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by John Mason -
Number of replies: 6

I am trying to embed videos in to Moodle with out much luck.

I am finding that they always show as length 00:00

If you go to jacwebhosting.co.uk there is going to be one on the home page of the site showing people how to log in.

I have tried 3 different browsers here at work and one via RDP at home.

Two at work I suspect don't have relevant plugins as they just show a link to the file. This is in fact more useful than what the other one (IE 9) does as at least you can download the file and play it. IE 9  shows a video box with controlls but clicking play does very little and looking at properties shows the video to be 00:00 in length. Chrome does similar on the PC I am using via RDP.

IE is using WMP to try and play the file. I can play the file happily on the computer using WMP but just not in moodle pages.

Can anyone help with this. Even if it is just to tell me you have tried it and it works fine for you which would indicate some issue with plugins here.

Thanks in advance.

John.

Using Win 7 & Moodle 2.52 (Win xp via RDP)

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In reply to John Mason

Re: Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by Guillermo Madero -

Hi John,

I went to your site and yes, the video property showed a zero length file, but after waiting for a while, the video finally appeared, and so, the length was also displayed: 00:42.

In the meantime I tried to open the video at another tab and this caused WMP to open and download the video; playing started only after it was completely downloaded.

The problem lies in the "avi" container format (extension) you are using. Try and change it to "mpeg", like so: "loggingin.mpeg".

Apart from that, I think you really need to see about the software you are using to create your video. A 38 MB file for a 42 second length video, without audio, is definitely not good. Instead of the "Microsoft Video 1 (CRAM)", I would use a different Codec (e.g. H.264). You also have to take into account that its size or ratio (1144x488, 1:2.34) is not standard, so it would be better to go for a 1280x720 (16:9) video. You might also want to consider hosting your video in a video server like YouTube or Vimeo.

You might want to take a look at some of the following references:

http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Video

http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Multimedia_plugins_filter

http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/mod/videofile/view

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=240635

 

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Supported_media_formats

http://www.awwwards.com/20-html5-video-websites-examples-and-resources.html

http://fortuito.us/diveintohtml5/video.html

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/

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In reply to Guillermo Madero

Re: Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by Christian Herman -

John,

I second Guillermo's advice.  I also wanted to give you a comparison on size on your video.  I have uploaded about 2 dozen videos to my Moodle instance, edited in Camtasia.  Several of my videos are around 38MB, however they are 12 minutes long, 1024x768 resolution (50% more pixels than your 1144x488 resolution), encoded with audio using h.264 codec as an mp4, and adjusted to 45% up Camtasia's scale between filesize and quality, so I'm slightly sacrificing quality to achieve a lower file size, from a relative 50/50 mix of those benefits.

avi spec is now more than 20 years old.  Avoid it. (my 2 cents)

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In reply to Christian Herman

Re: Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by John Mason -

Thanks.

See my reply below regarding the just throw up whatever the default program setting gave me because management wanted it done and preferably done yesterday. smile

I will have more time to play tomorrow so will come up with something far more sensible. smile

Cheers,

John.

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In reply to Christian Herman

Re: Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by Guillermo Madero -

Hi Christian,

Good idea, to do some comparisons. In my case, some of my videos are (file size and length):

07 MB, 02:18;
10 MB, 04:40;
18 MB, 08:16;
37 MB, 14:20.

All have the following specs:

Type: Video
Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)
Resolution: 1280x720
Frame rate: 30

Type: Audio
Codec: MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a)
Channels: Stereo
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
AAC extension: SBR

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In reply to Guillermo Madero

Re: Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by John Mason -

Oh yes so it does. I managed to leave the browser open here on my machine at home when I closed the RDP session and there was the video waiting for me when I got home.

Thanks for the tips. I have to say the video I threw up was very hastily screen grabbed after a request from the management to have it. As you point out I really haven't thought it through and probably tomorrow I will go back and grab a fresh recording. Now I can see what it does with it I will play with the settings on the screen capture tool as I suspect I forgot to tell it not to record an audio stream even though there is no sound. I can also choose different codecs, output containers and set the area to capture to be something sensible.

Thanks again for the very helpful answer.

 

John.

P.s. If I had created a set of subject icons for our site is there some where here I could share them?

 

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In reply to John Mason

Re: Embedded videos showing as 0 length

by Guillermo Madero -

Hi John,

Great to know; sometimes it takes some patience to see or have things working smile

For quick tasks you might want to use any the following, as they let you create a screencast very easily:

http://www.screenr.com/
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

Regarding software, you could try with a freeware application:

http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html
http://atomisystems.com/
http://www.screenpresso.com/
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

Or with a commercial one:

http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html
http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate.html

About the icons you mention, if you use a cloud service like dropbox or sugarsync, you could pack the icons, upload the zip file and then just share the public link. You could also attach the zip file to a post.

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