Edx No playable video sources found

[Anurag Ramdasan]

I have had an issue with one user not being able to access videos on edx.

Every time they go to the unit, it shows "No Playable video sources found".

The videos were uploaded as mp4 files and then the relative url was added in the unit.

I can see the videos and am not able to reproduce the error.

But for those who see the error, it is consistently reproducible.

Adding an alternative .webm file doesn't help either.

Is this a known issue? Has this been observed before and is there any known fix?

If not, any ideas what might be causing it?

Thanks,

Anurag Ramdasan.

[Chris Dodge]

Hello Anurag,

While I probably cannot help debug why one student is not able to view your videos, I would like to ask a follow-up question regarding if you are uploading video files into the "Files & Uploads".

If that is the case, I just wanted to pass along that we don't recommend that you serve large files (particularly video) out of Studio as it is not very performant. We'd recommend using a good fileserver (like Amazon's S3 if that is an option for you) that is better suited for video delivery.

There are plans on the Open edX roadmap to enhance the "Files & Uploads" to work better for these types of use cases. Unfortunately, I am not part of that work team, so I cannot give an estimate on when that work will be completed.

Best wishes,

Chris

[Anurag Ramdasan]

Hi Chris,

Edx right now uploads on GridFS right? I imagined it wouldn't be that bad for performance.

Also is there some configuration that I need to tweak to upload files to s3 or is the expectation

to upload to s3 and then just enter the hyperlink?

[John Eskew]

Anurag,

The performance problem emerges when many clients download a large course asset simultaneously. Since the application itself streams the asset out of GridFS and serves it to the client, the operation takes an amount of time dependent on the bandwidth of the client and ties up an application worker for that entire time.

There's no configuration to tweak to upload the files to S3 - though that's the eventual plan, shown here:

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/PLAT/GridFS+Replacement

The current expectation is what you stated: Upload to S3 and use the link in Studio.

Thanks,

John