ECourse MP4 videos

1 Overview

bxp software (bxp) now has a native tag for playing MP4 videos. Upload your MP4 video as an asset to the page and your browser should do the rest.

2 Cross Browser compatibility

Playing videos through eCourse is an interesting area of bxp with many different options available. The most consistent experience across all browsers is still to use Shock Wave Flash videos (SWF) files from Adobe.

However with new developments in the HTML5 area of the video tag, we are always looking for new and improved ways of delivering content.

bxp now has an auto detect ability on MP4 files and embeds them in a "video" tag automatically. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_video.asp

The eCourse will also provide a download link just beneath, in case the users browser doesn't support the tag.

The video tag is becoming more widely supported on modern browsers, but not all video formats are supported. Modern versions of Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari should be fine but Opera isn't doing MP4. For more information have a read of the w3schools on this topic http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_video.asp

A more detailed write up on the tag is available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video

Please note that as of September 2014, there are still significant issues with using the video tag. https://www.google.ie/?gws_rd=ssl#q=html+video+tag+issues

Even with SWF, the user must have Adobe Flash installed. Up to now, HTML requires use of the object and embed tags to make SWFs play ( http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_object.asp ). bxp will add all the necessary tag elements for you for SWF types and is cross browser compatible back to IE6. The video tag only works in IE9+.

3 Video Format Conversion

There are some really useful tools out there to help you convert your content for free!! Check out our eCourse tools suggestions Web_Development_Tools

If you are using an older browser you may need to convert the MP4 to Flash. Converting_MP4_to_SWF