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

Mark Wilcox m_p_wilcox at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Oct 9 10:23:18 EDT 2013


Hi Phil,

I don't deliver web training but I do have some experience with getting videos to work across a lot of browsers.

The only way of delivering videos to old browsers and maintaining your sanity is Flash. Even then, Adobe dropped support for IE6 last year, so the user has to have an old version already installed and if they've got a dud there's not a lot you can do to upgrade it. You'd definitely need to check if they really are using IE6 and if the browsers haven't been locked down to prevent plugin installs.

YouTube isn't a magic solution either unfortunately - they dropped support for IE6 back in 2010 and IE7 in 2012. Google have actually stopped supporting IE8 in some of their apps (although not YouTube).  I was going to suggest Brightcove instead because they serve video for a lot of dinosaur corporate environments but I checked and they ended IE6 & 7 support early this year:
http://support.brightcove.com/en/video-cloud/docs/customer-communication-about-end-life-ie6-and-ie7


Sadly the reason government clients are interested in web-based solutions in the first place is the same reason it's nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent experience - locked down and inflexible IT policy.

I don't think you really can do much better than mediaelement.js as a general purpose solution. If you can find out from the IT folks a specific minimum Flash version, for example, that's installed on all PCs then you might have a chance to do better. If they really are still using IE6 without the chance to upgrade then I fear you have no chance - even Microsoft is trying to kill IE6:
http://www.ie6countdown.com/


Probably not the advice you were looking for but I hope it helps avoid too much searching for a magic bullet.

Mark


________________________________
 From: Phil Davis <revdev at pdslabs.net>
To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>; LiveCode Developer List <livecode-dev at lists.runrev.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, 8 October 2013, 21:44
Subject: [OT] web training video delivery - how do YOU do it?
 

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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