[OT] web training video delivery - how do YOU do it?

Phil Davis revdev at pdslabs.net
Tue Oct 8 16:44:14 EDT 2013


Hi Friends,

If your clients or company deliver web training that includes videos, I 
would greatly appreciate any insight you can share from your experience.

My largest client delivers web training to his customers. His entire 
content development / deployment / management system is built with 
Livecode, and one app uses FFMPEG to render desktop movies (mostly QT) 
for the web (mp4, ogv, webm). That app then uploads content to an on-rev 
server. The server has code that serves the content and collects the 
training results. (To be clear, the training content is a set of web 
pages containing text, video, images and sometimes audio. It's 
interactive. We don't upload a single monolithic 30-minute training 
video, but rather a training title may have any number of smaller videos 
that are available on various pages in the training.)

My client now has a new opportunity to enter US state and fed government 
agencies in a big way. Problem is, they often use IE6/7/8 and are not 
open to change. As you may know, these are THE most problematic browsers 
in existence. We have found it extremely difficult to make all movies 
work all the time in all (IE) browsers. (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, later 
IE browsers are not a problem.)

We're very concerned that we'll blow this opportunity if we can't 
deliver a rock-solid web training experience, specifically the video part.

Do your clients or company have a great way of delivering web training 
that includes videos that always work every time, even in old IEs? If 
so, how do you do it? (Maybe your JS/CSS/HTML is better than ours.) We 
use John Dyer's mediaelement.js <http://mediaelementjs.com/> as the core 
of our web video playback.

We're considering ditching our in-house movie rendering process and 
using a media delivery service (like YouTube) for videos. Then the 
training movies would be uploaded to that service, and movies would be 
served from their server. We would use their embedded links and THEY 
would handle browser compatibility. At least that's how we're thinking 
about it. What am I missing? Have you ever done this? What has your 
experience been?

I'm stretching the limits of approved list subject matter with this, but 
here I am anyway. As you can imagine, there is a LOT resting on the way 
we go forward in this. Thanks so much for your time and feedback.

Feel free to contact me off-list as well.

-- 
Phil Davis
phil at pdslabs.net
503-307-4363 mobile




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