20 June 2012, 19:30

We come across the issue of embedding Youtube videos in the external video block in our Mahara system (version 1.4.1). It accepts the URL of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGfRe0A7AGE but not http://youtu.be/mGfRe0A7AGE Is this related to the filter settings as well? Thanks Shen

23 June 2012, 23:52

Hello Shen,

I believe this is due to the filtering which knows the full URL of YouTube, i.e. http://youtube.com/... but not the short URL http://youtu.be/... You will have to ensure that you use the long URL in order to embed YouTube files. The easiest is to just grab it from the address bar. You don't even need to hunt it down below the video. :-)

Cheers

Kristina

25 June 2012, 5:55

Thanks Kristina for the reply. Yes, I understand that to make it work, we have to use the full URL. However, it may not be very user friendly to only allow the full URL but not the URL YouTube provides explicitly for embedding videos. I would guess our student users are more likely to try the short URL first rather than the full URL. In the meantime, I couldn't find any handy instructions on which URL it will accept in the system. Do you think it worth considering to add the short URL into the filter?

25 June 2012, 7:48

Hi Shen,

I seems to be something that youtube has started doing since we released the last version. We certainly didn't leave it out on purpose. Unfortunately we have to try keep up with their changes.

We will consider adding it to the filters for the next release and the 1.6 series will have a better way to manage filters.

I've put the issue into the bugtracker here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1017464 where you can follow the progress of the issue.

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Contributing_Code has instructions on submitting patches if you can fix it yourself :)

Thanks,
Melissa.

25 June 2012, 17:30

Thanks Melissa.