Adding support for more video platforms for the "share external video" feature

[Andreas Trottmann]

Hello everyone

I'm working for Werft22 AG, the company behind nanoo.tv, the Swiss film platform for education.

These days,  many of the schools around here are using BigBlueButton conferences, and some of them have reached out to us because they can't share nanoo.tv videos using the "share external video" feature.

Just like other video platforms, users of nanoo.tv can create links that can be used to share videos. Such a link, for example https://nanoo.tv/link/v/VPUAXuYP, opens a HTML5 based video player; this player can also be embedded into existing web sites and can be controlled via Javascript using commands like "play", "pause", "seek to X seconds", "mute" etc.

We have developers familiar with JavaScript, Java, PHP, Perl and other languages and would like to ask you here if it would be welcomed by the BigBlueButton developer community if we'd add support for nanoo.tv videos to BigBlueButtons "share external video" feature, and if yes, where we should start.

Kind regads,

Andreas Trottmann

[Philipp Memmel]

Hey Andreas,

just my 2cents about this: I feel like it would be easier to add mp4
share support to nanoo.tv, if this is possible. For example by adding
"/download?.mp4" to the url of a video share link of nextcloud allows
you to easily share a video from nextcloud in BBB which is pretty
awesome. Maybe nanoo.tv already has a way to share a video directly
without webplayer?

Do you have reasons not to go this way? I think that implementing more
and more code on BBB side to support many different platforms is pretty
difficult to maintain. It is probably better to use a more or less
global standard for this (which would be the direct access to the mp4
source for example).

Sorry if I'm not exactly responding to your request :-)

Pypo

Am 18.02.2021 um 19:10 schrieb Andreas Trottmann:
> Hello everyone
>
> I'm working for Werft22 AG, the company behind nanoo.tv, the Swiss film
> platform for education.
>
> These days,  many of the schools around here are using BigBlueButton
> conferences, and some of them have reached out to us because they can't
> share nanoo.tv videos using the "share external video" feature.
>
> Just like other video platforms, users of nanoo.tv can create links that
> can be used to share videos. Such a link, for
> example https://nanoo.tv/link/v/VPUAXuYP

> <https://nanoo.tv/link/v/VPUAXuYP>, opens a HTML5 based video player;

> this player can also be embedded into existing web sites and can be
> controlled via Javascript using commands like "play", "pause", "seek to
> X seconds", "mute" etc.
>
> We have developers familiar with JavaScript, Java, PHP, Perl and other
> languages and would like to ask you here if it would be welcomed by the
> BigBlueButton developer community if we'd add support for nanoo.tv
> videos to BigBlueButtons "share external video" feature, and if yes,
> where we should start.
>
> Kind regads,
>
> Andreas Trottmann
>

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[Andreas Trottmann]

Thank you very much for your feedback!

Due to copyright rules, we cannot make a "MP4"-link available to a third-party platform, while inserting a video player (which may then check whether the user watching the video is correctly logged in) is allowed.

As standards go, we support OEMbed (https://oembed.com) which can at least be used to get HTML code to embed the video player in every participant's BBB window. This would not allow synchronized playback, but would at least be a step forward from "I need to share my screen (which gives issues with sound)" or "i need to copy a link into the chat).

Kind regads

Andreas Trottmann

[lfza...@gmail.com]

Hello Andreas,

We use react-player (https://github.com/CookPete/react-player/) in order to embed videos on in the html5 client. New video players can be added by implementing a class exposing a few methods that we rely on to synchronized presenters/viewers. The play,  pause, seek and getCurrentTime being the minimum required. Also you'll need to throw events for onReady, onPlay and onPause by calling the methods passed down to the components via props. You can read the code from react-player's repository as well as some of our custom players to get an idea of how this works.

Here are some references for you to start working on this:

* Adding Custom Players: https://github.com/CookPete/react-player/#adding-custom-players

* React Player Vimeo player: https://github.com/cookpete/react-player/blob/master/src/players/Vimeo.js

* Custom players go here: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/tree/v2.2.x-release/bigbluebutton-html5/imports/ui/components/external-video-player/custom-players

* Custom players are registered here: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/v2.2.x-release/bigbluebutton-html5/imports/ui/components/external-video-player/component.jsx#L8

Regards,

Lucas

[Andreas Trottmann]

Thank you very much! On first sight, this looks great - I'll have a look and give it a try.

Kind regards

Andreas Trottmann