Video - General Information

It is a rather complex topic though, due to the variety of formats, codecs, containers and combination of operating systems and browsers. We therefore generally recommend to only embed video in the .mp4 format in single pages. MP4 is the mandatory file format for creating a video learning resource.

Recommended format

The mp4 container using the H.264 video codec and the mp3 audio codec is widely established and accepted. Current Firefox, Chrome and Safari are capable of playing videos encoded in such a way.

Define: Container

Videos are stored as single file with a specific file extension in so-called containers. This container contains one or more video and audio tracks, each one encoded with a specific codec. A codec is essentially a compression algorithm as well as a description how data is filed. Unfortunately, some file extension are also used for container as well as codec names. Because of this, you can never solely rely on a video label, as it could stand for either the codec, the container or the file extension.

In OpenOLAT videos can be implemented in different ways:

as learning resource. The video is created in the authoring via the option "Import" or "Import URL" and then appears as an independent learning resource "Video". Information on the video learning resource and "Video Collection" can be found on the "Learning Resource: Video" page.
embedded in a single page, where videos uploaded as a file can be linked. Further information for the embedding of videos in the course element single page you can find on the page "Single Page: Add / edit video". Videos embedded this way are only available in the course where the video is embedded in the corresponding storage folder. Instead of storing videos in the storage folder of a course, they can also be stored in a resource folder. Included resource folders can be used in multiple courses.
directly as a file via the course element "Single page"
with the course element Podcast