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  • Author Author: Matt
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Improvements to the video player

Matt

We know there are a few issues with video publishing on the Community site since the upgrade, and those are in hand. We've also listened to Community feedback on the video player that's used on the site. There were a couple of things we focussed on;

 

1. Playback quality (being poor, especially on mobile)

2. Video player on mobile devices (lack of features you'd expect)

 

Playback quality

 

The first was quite difficult to pin down to anything specific. We use Brightcove as the video provider and it should detect the speed of your connection and serve up a 'rendition' of the video (basically a bit-rate + resolution that best matches). We don't know why it serves up really poor bit-rates when your connection can handle it, so what we've done is remove 5 of the lowest bit-rates which were super-low quality.. they were worse than useless, so we should be left with some half decent versions.

 

Video player on mobile devices

 

The player we had on mobile was really poor, but we've found a good alternative that works pretty well on mobile.. it makes the device use the built-in player, so on iOS you'll get the Full Screen, and Picture-in-Picture modes. On Android you'll get a Chromecast icon (if you've got a Chromecast device in the house).. but no full-screen icon for now.. that's in line for the next site update.

 

The player changes on the desktop too.. so gone is the light-coloured player, and you'll see a player with a dark colour scheme. If you've got Flash installed, then it'll show the Flash player (even if you'd rather it showed the HTML5 player). Without Flash installed it'll show a HTML5 player. In the next update it'll ignore Flash completely if you've got a HTML5-capable browser image

 

Screenshots

 

Player on iOS

 

image

 

Picture-in-Picture on iOS

 

image

 

Player on Android with Chromecast support

 

image

Parents

  • Hi Matt!

     

    I've tried the Android browsers and the videos come out great. Awesome stuff.

    I've noticed one semi-minor thing, which is that the 'embed code' option no longer seems to work in blog posts.

    For a few blog posts, I wanted to include videos which I'd uploaded in the past. To get them to appear inline, I usually go to

    the video, and select the 'embed code' option as shown here:

    image

    Then, I go into the blog post, go into the HTML view and paste that code in. However now it appears as a blank space.

    There is a workaround, which is to select 'Share this video' or 'Link to this video' (both seem to do the same thing) and

    that provides a URL which can be inserted in the blog post instead. However the disadvantage is that the video is no

    longer inline.

    Does the 'embed code' thing need to be updated, or should I use an alternate method to insert previous videos?

    There is an option while creating the blog post to use the 'Insert Video' tool and go to 'Choose from your videos' but that

    only lists 15 or so videos, and the ones I want are therefore often not in that list.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Hi Shabaz,

     

    Thanks for your questions. I'm going to tag in case he hasn't seen your question to see if we can get the embed option back for you.

     

    Christy

  • in reply to ChristyZ

    Hi Shabaz,

     

    This fails because we as a site have moved to https, but the brightcove embed code is giving the embed code with http.

     

    If you look through the embed code for http and change it to https and paste that instead, it all works fine image

     

    Let me know if you struggle.

     

    Duds

  • in reply to Dudley

    Oh, the only other thing I'd add is that Brightcove (the people who supply the back end system for the videos) have deprecated the video embed code.. meaning it might disappear in a future version of the player. That's also why they haven't fixed this to work properly on https sites.

  • in reply to Dudley

    Hi Christy, Dudley and Matt,

     

    Ah, I see. Thanks for the information!

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