limitations of the edX video player, and Wistia as an alternative?

[Nate Aune]

In many of our customer engagements, we find ourselves having conversations with customers who want:

1) to secure their videos (which means Youtube is not an option)

2) to use the edX video player (because they like the speed up/slow down and interactive transcript support)

3) to have the adaptive bitrate so that the videos play back optimally according to the user's device and bandwidth (which means S3 is not an option)

Afaik, these 3 things are mutually exclusive which means that our customers are stuck between foregoing the use of the edX video player and using a native player like Wistia, Brightcove or Vimeo (none of which have an interactive transcript), or using the native edX video player but risking that their videos are publicly exposed (if they use Youtube), or foregoing adaptive bitrate support (if they use S3).

I'm wondering if others have found good solutions to address these limitations. It seems like there are several options:

1) Extend the edX video player to support players other than Youtube or S3, like Wistia, Brightcove, Vimeo which all let you protect the video content by domain/IP restriction.

2) Make the edX video player able to negotiate with the client to serve an appropriate video file (HD, SD depending on the bandwidth and device). That way, you could at least upload the various renditions to S3, and the video player would figure out which one to use during playback, or at the very least, the student could manually select their preference as a profile setting.

3) Build a new XBlock video player, using something like Wistia as the backend, and use Wistia's API to:

    a) send student IDs from Open edX to Wistia for reporting purposes

    b) index the transcripts so that they appear in the edX search

I've already had a phone call with the CTO of Wistia (which happens to be a Boston-based company) about option #3, and he is willing to put some engineering support behind such an effort. The Wistia engineers obviously don't know Open edX, but could provide assistance on the Wistia API side.

Are there other folks on this list who would be interested in exploring one of these options, and even putting some money behind it?  We can probably get a customer or two to co-fund the efforts, but it might be a lot of work, so we want to gauge demand and support before proceeding.

Nate

[Manabu TERADA]

Hi Nate,

I think it's good point for us.
Our video solution is using AWS CloudFront and video.js. But we are
not supporting speed up/slow down and interactive transcript. Because
we don't know to make the functions by video.js. I know other player
support the functions, but the player is not OSS / not free.

I want to know more details and the progress.

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[Niral Modi]

We have had Vimeo Xblock to work but are having difficulty getting the Vimeo Videos to play on Android iOS device. Has anyone had success with that. We are open to working/ funding further development on Vimeo Platform looking at the lower cost for ongoing streaming.

[Carlos Turró Ribalta]

Hi Nate

 

At UP Valencia we are the main developers behind the Open Source video player named Paella Player (http://paellaplayer.upv.es ). This is the player that is used by several universities in the Opencast project, including some edX members, like Harvard (DCE) and other big Universities like ETH Zurich. In fact we had it working for some courses in our own Open edX platform.

 

Regarding the questions, Paella has currently support to all of them (1,2,3, speed up/down). We support interactive transcripts in several languages, several video qualities and adaptative bitrate. We could even use Youtube as a fallback/primary player to allow a constant user experience for all content.

 

Of course there should be some adaptation work to make it in Open edX, but we would be willing to compromise some effort to do it inside our edX commitment if that could be an appropriate solution for edX, and of course having support from other partners will make things faster.

 

If you want to comment on that please tell. 

Carlos

[Leonardo Salom]

I'm also interested in how this subject evolves.

[Nate Aune]

I'm happy to report that more than a year later, we've now developed a new Video XBlock together with Raccoon Gang that solves many of the problems that I cited back in my original post. Thanks to InterSystems and Open University for their generous sponsorship contributions to make this development work possible.

You can read a detailed overview of the Video XBlock features and what it provides beyond the built-in video module, in this blog post: 

https://appsembler.com/blog/deliver-videos-securely-open-edx-courses-new-video-xblock/

To summarize, the key features of this new Video XBlock are:

• Secure video hosting using Brightcove, Wistia, Vimeo (Brightcove, Wistia* and Vimeo* video content can be added simply by pasting the URL)
• Video encryption using Brightcove (use Brightcove 
• 3PlayMedia integration to fetch subtitles that are stored at 3PlayMedia
• Speed up / slow down controls
• Set start / end time
• Captions and interactive transcript (like the one that comes with Open edX) including downloadable transcripts
• Downloadable handouts
• Upload subtitle files or retrieve default ones
• Ability to specify a particular Brightcove player ID on a per-block basis.
• “Pluggable” backend meaning that additional video hosting providers can be added

We'd love for you to try out the XBlock and give us feedback! If you're a developer, we encourage you to get the latest code from Github and contribute bug fixes or new features. 

Lastly, if you like what you see and would like to help fund further development, please join Intersystems and Open University as sponsors of the Video XBlock. This will allow us to add more complete support for other video hosting providers such as Wistia, Vimeo, Ooyala, Kaltura, etc and make the XBlock work with the iOS and Android mobile apps, . Contact me offline to learn about the different sponsorship levels.

Oh, and you're at the Open edX conference this week, please come to our lightning talk at 13.00 CEST on Thursday, May 25 in room 4.1.D03 or tune in virtually on the Youtube stream. We'll also host a birds of a feather session on thursday afternoon during the afternoon coffee break (room TBD).

thanks,

Nate