Video format for repositories ... Need your help

[Haddad, April]

We are starting to prepare some of our videos so we can put them into Arca.

 

We are wondering what format is the best for the repository?  MP4??

 

Also, what software is best to transfer the videos/DVDs to this format?

 

Any other helpful hints?

 

Thanks,

April

 

April Haddad

Institute Librarian

 

Library

Tel: 604.528.5594 | Fax: 604.528.5593 | aha...@jibc.ca

715 McBride Boulevard, New Westminster, BC   V3L 5T4

 

JIBC | Canada's Leading Public Safety Educator | www.jibc.ca/library

 

[Mark Jordan]

Hi April,

We use Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/) to prepare videos - it's free and runs on any operating system.  An important trick that Handbrakes lets you perform is to "web optimize" the video as it is being ripped. This option moves the video's internal metadata (playing time, etc.) to the beginning of the file so that embedded players can start playing it immediately, instead of after downloading the entire file.

You can't go wrong with MP4 since it plays reliably in popular embedded video players.

Mark

Mark Jordan
Head of Library Systems
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Voice: 778.782.5753 / Fax: 778.782.3023 / Skype: mark.jordan50
mjo...@sfu.ca

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[Brandon Weigel]

Thanks for replying to that, Mark. I will note that we’ve been having some trouble with MP4 in Firefox — JW Player fails to play the mp4 datastream in Firefox, but works fine in other browsers. I know there are some issues with Firefox and mp4 in general, but is there a known solution to this?

Brandon Weigel
Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
Phone: 778.782.5419
Email: bran...@bceln.ca
Web: https://bceln.ca

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[Mark Jordan]

If you can share some links to problematic objects, I'd be happy to give them a try. Offlist if you prefer.

Mark

[Alex]

Afaik, JWplayer is being deprecated in favour of videoJS... might be worth making the switch and seeing if you still have the issue if there's nothing keeping you on JWplayer.

Are all of the MP4 files you're having with encoded the same way, and all using h264 for the video stream? I don't think h264 is enforced across all MP4 containers, and the video codec is technically more important than the container...

-alex

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[Brandon Weigel]

Thanks, Alex.. We might look at videoJS. What we have here (and I can’t link to it; it’s on kora.kpu.ca and behind XACML) is an AVI file, which Islandora processes and creates an mp4 datastream to play in browser. I’ve tried downloading the original AVI and ingest into Vagrant, and got the same result: no play in Firefox. So maybe there’s a problem with the codec for the video Cmodel?

Brandon Weigel
Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
Phone: 778.782.5419
Email: bran...@bceln.ca
Web: https://bceln.ca

[Alex]

Hmmmm. The ffmpeg command used by the video solution pack upstream looks fine to me:

$command = "$ffmpeg_executable -i $archival_path -f mp4 -vcodec libx264 -preset medium -acodec $audio_codec -strict -2 -ab 128k -ac 2 -async 1 -movflags faststart $out_file";

Unless you somehow have a version of ffmpeg on that server that was compiled without libx264, but in that case it wouldn't be playing anywhere, not just Firefox, right? Unless ffmpeg is configured to fall back to a different encoder in non-libx264 builds when that option is passed to it, and Firefox's implementation of OpenH264 is picky about the fallback codec, whereas Chrome's full ffmpeg implementation can still render whatever you throw at it.

If you run $ ffmpeg on that server, do you see --enable-libx264 on list of supported codecs? If so, I'd recommend just switching to videoJS...

-alex

[Brandon Weigel]

I haven't had a chance to try Alex's suggestions, but I did notice that if you ingest an mp4, the smaller mp4 derivative that it generates plays just fine on Firefox. So there is something about the conversion from AVI to mp4 that's causing the problem.

Perhaps it is a codec thing. I'll try Alex's commands when I get a chance.