20 September 2009, 20:32

My first video embed failed. I found in the User Guide

Mahara allows users to insert Youtube videos, Flickr photos, RSS feeds and much more.

  Does it have to be a Youtube video? Or is this about format? Which formats will work and which ones don't? In this particular case I tried .ogv.

Cheers

20 September 2009, 23:11

The external video block (where you include videos from other sites) should work okay. If you find bugs there we're keen to try and fix them quickly.

If you want to include videos from sites not on the list, that's harder and we'll need time to write filters for them.  We don't want to allow users to be able to put unsafe script & embed elements from untrusted sites into their mahara views, so we need to deal with the sites one by one, and update the filters every time the embed code changes on those sites.

The internal media block, which tries to embed video files uploaded to Mahara in the user file area, is pretty unreliable (apart from flash).  Playback depends on particular browser plugins being available for the format in question, and we've had quite a few problems with it.  File formats can be disabled in Site Administration > Administer Extensions under file/internalmedia Config and we probably ought to disable all the non-flash ones by default until we get this block right.

21 September 2009, 5:56

Hello Richar,

I was curious about this post and its answer. I knew that Mahara allows users to embed videos from other sites. However I couldnt embed videos from Vimeo.  I am uploading video tutorials in the Spanish wiki in Vimeo, as the quality is much better than in YouTube, as well as the storage capacity.

I couldn embed this video in a view:

http://vimeo.com/6448128

Is it because am I using an older version of Mahara 1,1:?

Thank you very much.

21 September 2009, 16:50

22 September 2009, 8:57

22 September 2009, 21:30

Thanks for the info Richard.

Would someone please explain the relation between vimeo and my original question about a .ogv?  (I tried to answer it myself with an admittedly quick look at vimeo and wikipedia)

22 September 2009, 23:02

There probably isn't much relation at all. It's Mahara's external video block type that deals with sites like youtube and vimeo.  With those sites I don't believe you get to choose the video format. You can upload videos in different formats but youtube automatically encodes your video to the flv format.

Video formats are important to Mahara in the internal video block type, which is what you use when you want to display a video that a user has uploaded directly to Mahara.

23 September 2009, 2:05

23 May 2010, 6:35

I'm getting on board with Mahara, which I think is great, but this issue seems like a real bottleneck to me...

Is there not a way to write an API that gives site administrators the ability to set decide what media/sites their users can embed?

23 June 2012, 23:54

Hello Don,

Sorry for not having seen your post earlier.

Mahara 1.5 has the SafeIframe feature which allows you to decide which sources you deem as safe. You will need access to the server in order to add your sources. In Mahara 1.6 there is going to be an admin interface for that. That'll make things much easier.

Cheers

Kristina