Re: [edx-code] How much external resource is needed by edX?

[John Hess]

Hi Wentao,

Good question.  We use a lot of services for different portions of the platform.  I don't know about all of them, but I can offer a bit of information about video.

Our default video player (the one you see used on edx.org) is youtube backed as you noted.  Most of our edx.org courses use that player, but some chose not to (for example, CS50x, which hosts its videos as .mp4s on a CDN).  To compensate for the fact that youtube is blocked in a few countries and that some students can't stream video quickly enough or want to watch offline, we usually post links to amazon S3 hosted files on edx.org so users can download any videos they wish.  It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than a complete blackout.

If you're looking to host your own videos or to use other providers, you can always incorporate arbitrary html into a vertical and host whatever videos you need (vimeo, self hosted, youku, todou, CDNs, etc.) .

Cheers,

John

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Wentao Han <wenta...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm from Tsinghua University in China. As you know, some website like YouTube is blocked by GFW in China, and this causes edX to work incorrectly when it depends on these external resource. So, my question is, how much external resource is needed by edX? And how much of it can be moved to our own server? Thanks.

[Wentao Han]

Thank you, John. Besides videos, I found some other resources like JavaScript scripts fetched outside the site during loading. Are you planning to embed that into this project in the future? This will reduce the dependency of this site, and increase availability.

[Peter Pinch]

Hi Lyla. I'm really excited to hear that the new video component is so far along. 

I was able to turn on access to it via the advanced settings in studio, and then add a videoalpha component. But I'm a little confused by the settings. Is there any (preliminary) documentation?

Just looking at the xml, it appears that youtube is the only streaming option? I tried omitting the YouTube id to see if could force it to use the HTML5 player, but that just lead to an error from YouTube. 

Thanks,

Peter

Peter Pinch |  Production Manager, OpenCourseWare

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One Broadway, 8th Floor  |  Cambridge MA 02142

E pdp...@mit.edu | T 617-253-6256 | C 617-652-0183

On Jun 12, 2013, at 1:41 PM, Lyla Fischer wrote:

It is also possible to configure the soon-to-be-out-of-beta "videoalpha" component, which can play video from any arbitrary server with variable speeds using HTML5. If you want to try it out and let us (me, especially) know about any issues that you have with it, go to the advanced settings and add ["videoalpha"] to the advanced_modules setting. It will then show up as an option in the advanced component section when you add a new component. 

-Lyla