Moodle Plugins directory: SWF-Activity-Module | Moodle.org
SWF-Activity-Module
Important:
Uploading content for the SWF Activity Module requires FTP access to /moodledata/repository/ If you do not have FTP access, ask your IT support about setting up an account for you or giving you access to an existing account. A good free and open source FTP client is FileZilla.
What does it do?
The SWF Activity Module is a Moodle plugin for deploying multimedia Flash learning apps, also known as Flash templates. Teachers and course content developers can use the SWF Activity Module to deploy any Flash apps, including but not limited to those that use external data and media in order to function correctly. It also allows Flash apps to communicate with Moodle for purposes such as passing learners' grades into Moodle's grade book.
Why use this module?
This module is especially useful for deploying M3U (playlists), SMIL, XML, and MPEG-7 multimedia learning interactions where using Moodle's built in file management system would be impractical. Large numbers of files can be uploaded and managed via FTP clients and the module provides a system of URL linking that is predictable, so you can write them into SMIL, XML, and MPEG-7 files, and portable, so you can transfer/redistribute multimedia interactions from one Moodle to another with the minimum of time and effort. Doing any of these with Moodle's file management system, even with external repositories, requires exponentially more time and effort.
Video/Media Player
The SWF Activity Module can support a number of popular Flash based media players and comes with the JW Player 5 (not free) and the free and open source Strobe Media Player (SMP) pre-installed. The SMP is part of the Open Source Media Framework: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osmf.adobe/
There are demos of the SMP in action on the SWF Activity Module demo course here: http://matbury.com/moodle/ (Allows guest access).
If you would like another free and open source media player included in the SWF Activity Module standard distribution, please let me know in the comments section below.
Flash learning apps
It includes one example Flash learning app, the Concept Map app: http://matbury.com/wordpress/call-software/ A word search app is also provided separately for testing and demonstration purposes. You're free to use the word search in courses if you wish. Matt Bury has a selection of Multimedia Interactive Learning Apps (MILAs) designed to assist and augment Second Language Acquisition (SLA) especially in EFL, ESL, ELF, and EAP contexts: http://matbury.com/wordpress/call-software/
Sufficient documentation, source code and examples are provided on this project site so that Flash developers can easily write or adapt applications to work fully with the SWF Activity Module. See the project wiki pages for further details.
Demo
See demos of the latest version on my R&D Moodle: http://matbury.com/moodle/ (Allows guest access).
Useful links
Free and open source projects compatible with the SWF Activity Module:
- Preloader app: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-Preloader
- Concept Map app: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-ConceptMap
- Debugging app: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-Debugger
Other useful projects:
- Free and open source Flash, Actionscript, and Haxe IDE (for editing and compiling Flash apps, similar to Adobe Flex/Flash Builder): http://www.flashdevelop.org/ (It's excellent!)
Useful links
Screenshots
Thanks again for your work!
Jim
You can transcode the video file and crop off the green part while you're doing it. A good free and open source transcoder that can do this is http://handbrake.fr/ Transcodes to MP4 (and M4V which is the same) and MKV.
Good luck!
I haven't "officially" made it for production use but there aren't any more bugs that I know of. So far the design seems to be more or less final so it should be ready soon-ish.
Thank you for your patience
This very useful plugin does not have its English strings available for translations in AMOS for the 2.6 and 2.7 branches. Only the 2.5 branch is available.
Maybe it has a similar problem as described for the certificate plugin in the tracker CONTRIB-4946, but I am not a programmer, merely a translator.
Thanks for your help.
I like the swf activty in moodle 1.9,the version of moodle 1.9 can choose the swf file from course file's directory,but the version of moodle 2 can't.
I had found the module Repositories: Course File Area which replicates the Moodle 1.x course files functionality ,would you change the full url to file-selector ? I had tried the module for your mplayer module,and modified mplayer module,it run very well.
We want to try and use this plugin in the same way as your excellent mplayer for Moodle 1.9 to provide the ability to use xml playlists in Moodle 2. However I'm unable to figure out where to put our media files and how to address them in the XML playlist. If I use absolute references e.g src="http://localhost/moodle2/file.php/99/flv/yourvideo_1.flv" as you suggest, I just receive a video not found or access denied error.
Would love to get this working, there doesn't seems to be any viable alternative in Moodle 2 to your old mplayer module - it's still blocking our upgrade from 1.9!
Many thanks for any input.
The correct URL to the playlist in your case would be src="http://localhost/moodle2/mod/swf/content.php/content/video/myidentifier/myplaylist.xml"
The playlist file would be in /moodledata/repository/swf/content/video/youridentifier/myplaylist.xml
URLs in the playlist that link to videos, audio, images, etc. should have the absolute URLs, e.g. http://localhost/moodle2/mod/swf/content.php/content/video/myidentifier/myvideo.mp4 or
I hope this helps!
It does help, the playlist works fine now, many thanks for getting back to me. Is there anyway to display the playlist as an overlay on the screen as there was in mplayer? We used to use this to pick the relevant track we required.
Paul
I'm using your plugin for a year already and i must say it´s a plus to have.
Now, im trying to use it to play some videos and i have something that i dont know how to handle;
When playing a video from firefox i always get a "download" button that i want to disable, and the same with the "right click > save this video"
Can you please tell me how can i hide those options?
Thanks in advance.
It sounds like Flash is disabled and you're getting the alternative content displaying. The download link is hard-coded in mod/swf/viewlib.php, on lines 117 - 132, function swf_get_html5_embed().
I hope this helps!
I'm trying this with Moodle 3.1. it's working fine, except for the grade posting part. How to use the gradeupdate.php script? I tried manually calling the script with gradeupdate.php?id=XX&swfid=YY&rawscore=88 and it worked. but how to get the rawscore once a user submit?