New video link/embed option: videos hosted on Sharestream

Submitted by ormjr on Sat, 01/12/2019 - 00:29
Forums: 
Feature requests

Hi folks,

As the request title states, we request that H5P's video player/interactive video player support the link/embed codes produced by the Sharestream video hosting platform.   Sharestream is video hosting service that focuses on videos hosted for education.  Our state-wide institution (in California) has adopted Sharestream as our secure video hosting platform for our 23 campuses..  The videos we host, just from our campus alone, entail thousands of videos (e.g., faculty lectures, demos, etc.).

Our campus uses the Moodle LMS platform and we've adopted H5P as part of the LMS. However, H5P's support for video links/embeds in the interactive video player, for example, only works with uploaded videos (which we could do before going to Sharestream cloud hosting service) and ubiquitous services like Youtube or Vimeo.  However Sharestream now hosts most of our video content securely--in fact the Sharestream videos can only be viewed by those logged into our LMS.  We can embed that Sharestream content in our Moodle courses wiithout issue, but we CANNOT integrate the video links that Sharestream produces into our H5P content.  Every attempt we've made shows up as an unknown source/video format unrecognized error.  Sharestream uses only the .mp4 format, which should not pose a problem for H5P, but H5P and Sharestream won't work together at all (some code or protocol incompatibilty, no doubt).

So to reiterite, I am requesting that H5P enable support in its video apps for links/embed codes from the Sharestream hosting service.  This would enable our use of factulty lectures, etc within H5P interactive videos, for example.  For the H5P organization, it might mean additional opportunities to have H5P adopted by more of our 23 campuses, since Sharestream is now institutionalized throughout our system.

Regards,

ORMJR

 

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BV52's picture

BV52

Mon, 01/14/2019 - 08:46

Hi ORMJR,

Thanks a lot for contributing your ideas on how to make H5P better! We’re now working on something called the H5P supporter program allowing the H5P community to vote for and fund the top voted H5P features. Also there are developers in the community who every now and then works on a feature they find interesting or useful.

While we are still do not have the full integration have you tried using the source URL of the video instead of the player URL. In most cases this works for non Youtube hosted videos?

-BV52

ormjr

Thu, 01/17/2019 - 23:02

Thanks for the response, BV52.

In answer to your question, yes.  Sharestream can output links and embed codes for any of the given videos stored on their platform.  We've tried them all, and nothing worked so far.  

I appreciate the reply and hope that my request is adopted.  Thanks!

otacke's picture

otacke

Fri, 01/18/2019 - 22:03

Hi ormjr!

What to these links look like? They need to point directly to the file, not to a page displaying it or something similar.

Cheers,
Oliver

ormjr

Fri, 01/25/2019 - 21:13

Hi Oliver,

Yes, the Sharestream platform produces both a streamable URL, and an iframe-based embed code,  Here are examples of each (note, "xxx" in the address denotes our institution prefix in the URL address.  Here is the streamable URL example:

https://xxx.sharestream.net/ssdcms/ip.do?u=a4207fd6144946c

Embed code example:

<iframe allowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen width="420" height="261" id="embediframe" style="border:none;" src="https://xxx.sharestream.net/ssdcms/ip.do?u=a4207fd6144946c&autoPlay=false"></iframe>

All video assets on the Sharestream platform are .mp4 format, so they are not using proprietary or unusual codecs that H5P might not recognize..

The issue I think may be problematic is that these videos are served ONLY to our Moodle LMS, which requires institutional logins for access.  However, both Sharestream and H5P are integrated into our Moodle environment, so H5P content calling a Sharestream video would occurr only within the Moodle LMS.  Our LMS and its plugins (e.g., H5P) and external tools (.e.g., Turnitin, Sharestream) are all still able to communicate with outside servers in order to access whatever tool content or service is being used, so that "should not" be an issue, but who knows.  The bottom line is that when we try to create an H5P interactive Video that calls a Sharestream video file; it does not work.

I hope it's something that can be resolved.

Thanks, Oliver..

 

otacke's picture

otacke

Mon, 01/28/2019 - 12:46

Hi!

The links generated by sharestream is not a direct link to the video file, but generate the page including a player, etc. There's no way for H5P to know what file to play unless someone creates a so called "handler" for sharestream that either retrieves this link and basically uses the HTML5 player or uses an application programming interface to control the video (just like it's done with YouTube). If you're lucky, the service does not obfuscate the direct link to the video asset, and in that case you should be able to find it by searching the page's source code for ".mp4" (or possible some other suffix in case the videos get transcoded) or for "video".

Just mentioning: mp4 is only a container for various sound/video formats that may require different codecs that the host system will have to provide. H5P has nothing to do with actually playing the file using codecs. H5P just takes over control of play, pause, etc. and puts interactions on top.

Regarding the access to the video files: This will totally depend on how the system's access control management works. If it's some 1:1 binding between the moodle instance and sharestream, H5P might not be able to access files at all. If it's just some domain based binding like e.g. Vimeo can offer, it would work. Can't tell.

Best,
Oliver