David Scotson

Hi Matt,

It looks like we're going to have to agree to disagree. You keep describing things that in my opinion (although I personally can do them) are not simple, and then claiming they're simple e.g.

"It's not that difficult to find software that'll output to a variety of formats." and
"OK, so it's easy to produce decent quality video in a range of resolutions and formats."

I simply can't agree with those statements, and think the paragraph that precedes them would scare off most users of Moodle, even most users of video in Moodle, so we're clearly going to disagree about anything else that starts from that assumption. Just using the phrase "rushes" places you in a different category from these users, never mind the technical stuff.

I want users to be able to easily upload a single H.264 video file and have it viewable everywhere. I have veteran ITN and BBC cameramen in the next office and it's all they really need too. Everything else is a bonus, and should be added in a way that doesn't make the basic stuff harder or more confusing. Possibly in a completely different activity module if the two use cases diverge sufficiently.

On transcoding, H.264 (and AAC for audio) is a good enough codec that you can make visually/audibly lossless conversions of any other format, even if you use a sub-optimal encoder. Certainly anyone capable of using the tools you mention in your first paragraph will have no problem, and I'd assume it would "just work" for most other people too. One step of conversion just isn't enough to make a noticeable difference when the output format is H.264 (or similarly advanced).

Look at Youtube, which isn't exactly renowned for its video quality, since it aims for broad access instead. Everything uploaded there goes through an extra encode step, and it's got video from all sorts of crazy sources (old phone cams, digitized VHS, people filming their televisions with tablet cameras) but generally if it's noticeably poor quality it's because the original was poor quality, not anything to do with the conversion Youtube does.

But, even assuming that wasn't true, what's the alternative? Putting the original MPEG-2, WMV or whatever file on the internet? It's simply not going to work. And suggesting people provide versions in multiple codecs, and multiple sizes seems to contradict warnings about conversion losses.

This conversation has gone in all sorts of directions. My original aim was to simplify life for people worried about what codec to use, with the good news that you only need one. Pushing the boundaries of tech is always going to be exciting for those that are enthusiastic about it, but some people just want to get a simple task done. We need to be careful we don't scare them off with the stuff that we find interesting.

Note that they're working on changing this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851290

Though they have no solution planned for XP. There Firefox users, like Firefox users on Mac OS X today and IE8 users, still need Flash.

And I really would suggest you just help them to install Flash. Even today, quite a lot of the internet doesn't work if you don't have Flash, especially the educational bits. Even things that work on iOS devices without Flash are likely to fail if your desktop browser has no Flash.

Hi Matt,

You missed my meaning when I described this as complicated, it's not the HTML that's tricky. I meant that if a teacher or lecturer came to you with a video they took on their camera, what would your simple instructions be for providing it in multiple media formats?

I don't think any such simple instructions exist, because it's a fundamentally hard task. And asking people to complete a hard task, particularly a task that provides no benefit to them or their students, isn't really helpful if you're trying to get them excited about the potential benefits of video in education.

Your other examples are all fundamentally hard too, and would be made harder still if you're really expecting people to e.g. provide the playlists in multiple codecs. I think you'll find people get much more excited about things like captions when you make it easy for them.

Talking of getting excited about captions, are you aware that Youtube will let you upload a transcript of a video and then it'll use speech recognition technology to automatically match up the subtitles to the relevant part of the video? That's pretty cool. Youtube is my real first answer when anyone asks about video in Moodle, it does almost all the complicated stuff for you, it even makes the video available in VP8 as well as H.264 and will convert from basically any input file format so makes it all pretty easy as well. But privacy is a big thing for certain topics so Moodle really needs something for those cases too.

Hi Jonas,

standardizing on H.264 will work on any device your students or teachers choose to use. That's why I'm recommending it, it's a single codec with as close to 100% support as you'll ever get. The browsers that don't play it natively (notably IE8 and Firefox on XP) can play the exact same file with Flash.

There is nothing you can do to make "providing multiple format videos" easy, it's a fundamentally difficult task to produce multiple copies of a video, which 9 times out of 10 will already be in H.264 format. And when it's not necessary to do something tricky, you shouldn't really try. This is a thread about user interfaces after all, and asking a user to create and upload two (or three) files when the extra files don't actually provide any benefit is not a good user interface. Even if they ignore the advice, it adds worry and complexity to the process.

I ran into a similar issue where it was turning i tags into em tags (to be more semantic). Is that what's happening here?

Though thinking about it, it only happened on paste I think.