Downloading and playing entire movies
September 7, 2016 12:00 AM
Hello
I wonder what you think. Let's say I have a movie (mp4). The movie lasts for 100 minutes. I upload it with a Lectora title. I imagine (I have not tried it) that it would take a very long time to download into a student machine and then play it back.
So... I am wondering as follows. What if I split the movie into, say, 5-minute (or smaller) segments. Downloading 5 minutes should not be immensely time-consuming. I can now play the downloaded segment. Is there
(a) some way to download the next segment (and others following) while the first segment is playing? and
(b) is there some way to play the next segment on completion of the first segment. I guess that the usual "Done playing" action will be operational.
So... can this work (especially (a) above)? and
Is this the best way to do it?
BTW, in the system that I am imagining, there may be good reason to download each 5-minute segment independently of playing the entire movie. This means that, ideally, the system would check first if a segment had been downloaded before it actually downloads it.
Your opinions as ever are very much appreciated.
Andrew
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Discussion (9)
Thank you everybody. Jennie, are you agreeing or disagreeing with Sergey and Tim? I think they are both saying that the video is actually buffered by the lectora media player so that it can be played without being fully downloaded, but you seem to be saying that this is not the case. So... which is it?
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Sergey - thanks for the translation ... Now... assuming that one has a standard LMS (may not be the case), it seems to me that the streaming server is probably separate from the LMS. So... here is a question I have not asked for a long time:
On a Linux VPS, which streaming server would you install? Or would you use an external service??? Or???
Sorry for my profound ignorance of this... :( :(
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Doesn't Lectora video player do buffering and streaming so that is plays before the whole movie is downloaded?
I'm using words interchangeable that I shouldn't be lol The video will be playable when enough of the video is loaded to begin playing, so buffering or streaming is correct
Darrel's link in simple words:
1. Ask the server admin to configure the LMS server to support streaming media.
2. Make sure you use web-optimized MP4s.
Sergey and Tim are correct if it's an MP4 or other non-streaming video format Lectora has to load the whole object before displaying it. If you added to a page before you got to it you could guarantee the whole video was ready to be watched in it's entirety which I've heard of other developers doing.
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I'm with Sergey, I had the impression the player does some kind of streaming. I'd start testing by just uploading the whole movie and see what happens.
Try using a tool like QTIndexSwapper or FFMPEG to move the index file from the end of the MP4 to the front so it can stream.
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