I hope you are doing well!
I am working on an eLearning website and came across the topic of the video loading. Since videos are of various sizes, it would be impossible to make the user wait for the entire download of the video for them to start watching, so it must be taken as a stream where the video keeps loading content as the user watches (similar to YouTube I guess). However, I am failing to find how this works? I've been recommended the use of SCORM and xAPI to help with this but I am only finding help on how to upload SCORM files or how to write xAPI code and not how to set them up in our website.
How can we make our videos download as the User watches? Are SCORM and xAPI actually what we should be looking for?
For context, we will be using React JS for our Frontend and will be saving the videos on a server.
I would greatly appreciate any advice you have and thank you for your time!
We tried using xAPI and SCORM however we aren't understanding how they might help
SCORM and xAPI by themselves are not going to assist you with this in general. To stream video via an eLearning course you will need to use a video player (such as the HTML5 video player or video.js) that understands streaming video protocols and to encode the video files in a format supported by that player. I would suggest reading about HLS for instance, though I didn't read the entire page, this is a good place to start: https://www.dacast.com/blog/hls-streaming-protocol/
A traditional eLearning course, such as you would have with SCORM, is going to provide a reasonable way to wrap the playing of video such that it can be launched for a learner via an LMS and may capture data such as completion. xAPI is probably suggested because it provides a more robust way of enabling the capture of interaction data such as when the learner plays, pauses, or seeks in a video. My preferred approach for doing this is to leverage cmi5, and there is an example of xAPI video profile usage within a cmi5 course in the Project CATAPULT sample content, see https://github.com/adlnet/CATAPULT/tree/main/course_examples. It could be adapted to leverage something like HLS and get streaming capability. Confirm with your LMS of choice ahead of time whether it supports cmi5 as adoption is still lower than for SCORM.
SCORM Cloud (a bit of a misnomer, https://cloud.scorm.com/) provides builtin video handling via the cmi5 mechanism and will soon support video streaming beyond just from YouTube without the need to author a course separately.
Related
I'm trying to put together an open source library that allows iOS devices to play files with unsupported containers, as long as the track formats/codecs are supported. e.g.: a Matroska video (MKV) file with an H264 video track and an AAC audio track. I'm making an app that surely could use that functionality and I bet there are many more out there that would benefit from it. Any help you can give (by commenting here or—even better— collaborating with me) is much appreciated. This is where I'm at so far:
I did a bit of research trying to find out how players like AVPlayerHD or Infuse can play non-standard containers and still have hardware acceleration. It seems like they transcode small chunks of the whole video file and play those in sequence instead.
It's a good solution. But if you want to throw that video to an Apple TV, things don't work as planned since the video is actually a bunch of smaller chunks being played as a playlist. This site has way more info, but at its core streaming to Apple TV is essentially a progressive download of the MP4/MPV file being played.
I'm thinking a sort of streaming proxy is the way to go. For the playing side of things, I've been investigating AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer (more info here) as a way of playing the video track. I haven't gotten to audio yet. Things get interesting when you think about the AirPlay side of things: by having a "container proxy", we can make any file look like it has the right container without the file size implications of transcoding.
It seems like GStreamer might be a good starting point for the proxy. I need to read up on it; I've never used it before. Does this approach sound like a good one for a library that could be used for App Store apps?
Thanks!
Finally got some extra time to go over GStreamer. Especially this article about how it is already updated to use the hardware decoding provided by iOS 8. So no need to develop this; GStreamer seems to be the answer.
Thanks!
The 'chucked' solution is no longer necessary in iOS 8. You should simply set up a video decode session and pass in NALUs.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#513
I'm working on an app that allows a user to select music tracks on their iphone, listen to it and share it with another person live so that the other person can listen to the same song in sync.
i've managed to get the following prototype working: manually add a file to the bundle i'm working with, then decode it using AudioFileReadPackets and sending it over the network using GKSession.
On the receiving end.. I use audio queue/streaming services to read the stream and play the music (ie AudioFileStreamOpen, AudioFileStreamParseBytes, AudioQueueNewOutput, AudioQueueStart etc. See here for more details).
That said, I found out that I can't simply read a file from the iphone's file system and decode it.. rather I gotta use the AVAssetReader and so on. There are many examples of doing that on Stack Over Flow, but they focus on the immediate technical implementation rather than explaining the big picture.. I couldn't find much comprehensive guid or documentation from Apple's developer guide website (see how they describe CMSampleBuffer Reference for example; function parameters have no descriptions etc).
Any links/books/ etc that may lead me in the right direction here? Specifically about accessing audio files in the iPod library and segmenting them using AVAssetReader such that they can be sent in a streaming fashion over a network, to be played via audio queue/streaming services
I found this book to be amazingly helfpul: Learning Core Audio: A Hands-On Guide to Audio Programming for Mac and iOS
I am trying to implement Progressive Downloading of a video in my iOS application that can be played through AVPlayer. I have already implemented a downloader module that can download the files to the iPad. However, I have discovered I cannot play a file that is still being written to
So, as far as I can tell, my only solution would be through downloading a list of file 'chunks' and then keep playing through every file as they are ready (ie: downloaded), probably using HLS
Searching I have come across this question which implements the progressive download through hls but other than that, I can find no other way
However, I keep coming across search results that say how to configure web servers to leverage the iOS support for HTTP Progressive Downloading, but with no mention of how to do it from the iOS side
So, any one have any ideas and/or experience about this?
EDIT: I have also found there could be a way of doing it other way around (ie: streaming, then writing streamed data to disk) which was suggested by this question but still cannot get it to work as it seems it does not work with non-local assets!
From what you say, you might want to change approach and attempt to stream the file. Downloading and playing at the same time, I would say is the definition of Streaming. I hate when people post links to the Apple documentation but in this instance reading a tiny bit of this documentation will help you more than I ever can. It should all make sense if you are lready working with connections and video, you just need to change your approach.
The link: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/networkinginternet/conceptual/streamingmediaguide/Introduction/Introduction.html
My research has led me to learn that Apple's media element handler is a singleton, meaning I can't have a video playing while an audio is playing in the background. I'm tasked to build a slideshow presentation framework and the client wants a background audio track, timed audio voice-overs which match bullet points, and variable media which can either be an image or video - or a timed cycle of multiple media elements.
Of course, none of the media works on iOS. Each media element cancels out the previous.
My initial thought is to embed the voice-over audio into the video when there's a video present, but there's an existing Flash version of this setup which depends on existing assets so I pretty much have to use what's delivered.
Is there ANY work-around for this? I'm testing on iOS 4.3.5. The smartest devs in the world are on this site - we've got to be able to come up with something.
EDIT: Updated my iPad to iOS 5.0.1 and the issue remains.
How about do it with CSS to do the trick.
Maybe you know about a company called vdopia that distribute video ad on mobile.
http://mobile.vdopia.com/index.php?page=mobilewebsolutions
They claim to developed what so called vdo video format, that actually just to do a css sprite running on that :D
I mean you could have your "video" as a framed image, then attach html5 audio tag on there.
I would like to know your response
Are you working on a Web App or on a Native Application?
If you are working on a Web App you're in a world of hurt. This is because you simply do not have much control over things that Mobile Safari doesn't provide right away.
If this is the case I would come forth and be honest with the stakeholders.
If you are working on a Native Application you can resort to a mechanism that involves some back and forth communication between UIWebView and ObjC. It's actually doable.
The idea is the following:
Insert special <object> elements in your HTML5 documents, that you handcraft yourself according to your needs, taking special care to maintain the attr-* naming convention for non-standard attributes.
Here you could insert IDs, paths and other control variables in the multimedia artifacts that you want to play.
Then you could actually build some javascript (on top of jQuery,p.e.) that communicates with ObjC through the delegation mechanism on the UIWebView or through HTTP. I'll go over this choice down below.
Say that on $(document).ready() you go through all the objects that have a special class. A class that you carefully choose to identify all the special <object>.
You build a list of such objects and pass them on to the ObjC part of your application. You could easily serialize such list using JSON.
Then in ObjC you can do what you want with them. Play them through AVPlayer or some other framework whenever you want them played (again you would resort to a JS - ObjC bridge to actually signal the native part to play a particular element).
You can "communicate" with ObjC through the delegation pattern in UIWebView or through HTTP.
You would then have a JS - ObjC bridge in place.
The HTTP approach makes sense in some cases but it involves a lot of extra code and is resource hungry.
If you are building an ObjC application and want further details on how to actually build an ObjC - JS bridge that fits these needs get back to us :)
I'm halting this post as of now because it would be nice to know if it is in fact a Native App.
Cheers.
This is currently not possible. As you notice when a video plays it takes up the full screen with quicktime and moves the browser to the background. The only solution at this time is to merge the audio and video together into an mp4 format and play that single item.
If I understand you correctly, you are not able to merge the audio and video together because it relies on flash? Since iOS can't play flash you should merge the audio and video together and use flash as a backup. There are numerous html5 players which use javascript to try and play the html5 video first then fallback to flash for backup.
You mention there is an existing Flash setup of the video - is it a an swf file, could you import it into a video/audio editing software and add an audio track on top?
Something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2vvH7oi8m8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Also, if it is a Flash file, will you be converting it to an avi or like for iOS? If you'd have to do it anyway, there is your chance for adding an audio track.
Could you use a webservice to merge the streams in real time with FFMpeg and then stream one output to quicktime?
To elaborate maybe a library like http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/about.html could also work. It looks like they have method
DESCombine – A class library that uses DirectShow Editing Services to combine video and audio files (or pieces of files) into a single output file. A help file (DESCombine.chm) is provided for using the class.
This could then be used to return the resulting data as the response to the call and loaded via the HTML5 player.
Been having trouble with YouTube lately with regards to autoplay, looping and playlists. Currently using the AS3 embedded player and it was working fine until recently when autoplay and playlist options became mutually exclusive. I am also finding the loop option doesn't work with autoplay.
So, looking at options other than YouTube as we will have access to the video anyway and can either upload or stream using whatever technology is appropriate. My application is for touchscreen interactive kiosks which will be largely unattended and I want to be able to run embedded video with all controls turned off to prevent anyone from jumping off to some other website at any point. This is crucial! I don't mind if a touch can pause the video like it does with YouTube but links must not be available to jump out.
My web app is written in Rails 3 with HTML, CSS3 and JQuery where required. It runs on IE8/9 on the kiosks and Safari mainly during development. I'm using Heroku.com for hosting.
Hopefully I've given enough background here to attract some good answers but please let me know if I've missed anything important.
Thanks for your time,
Craig.
This service is awesome in quality and price.
http://sublimevideo.net/
If you are using heroku for your hosting, you should take advantage of their add-on. The interface is super clean and you have full flexibility to mold playlists or behavior.
Panda Stream
http://addons.heroku.com/pandastream