Normally I save the nuts and bolts stuff for my http://kerryj.com blog, but I’ve been bubbling over about this to colleagues so I’ll post it here instead.
I’m a big believer in spreading content around the web — so will continue to nag everyone in my organisation to post videos to edna Groups, YouTube, TeacherTube, Flickr, blip.tv, vimeo, viddler, VoiceThread, etc. etc. but the fact is that for many educators, these sites are blocked.
So how to embed video, make it relatively painless to view and download and make it accessible?
Enter the JW player. This player is free for noncommercial use and only 30 Euro for commercial use. All you do is sign up, download some files, unzip them and upload them to your server. It comes with a very easy to use web-based fill in the blank interface that allows you to change the colours, choose the size and layout and even play a playlist!
It plays MP4 videos really well — although I found I had to compress them a bit more than I usually like to get them to start quickly.
Still for FREE and easy and accessible, I’m willing to accept some artefacting.
My workflow was as follows:
Render out high quality AVI videos from original edit
Render out reasonable quality MOV files from the AVI
Render out medium to low quality MP4s encoded with the HT264 codec and optimised for streaming
Upload the videos and the script to the server
Create the XML playlist (Right click on this to view code and copy into notepad, then replace with your information) and upload it to the server
Use the web wizard to tweak the player layout, colours, etc.
Copy and paste the code
Below is an example of the player calling up that XML playlist:
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