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As of August 1st, 2008, the Edutech web site will no longer be updated. Edutech was funded by the Swiss Virtual Campus programme, which ended on July 31st, 2008. Some activities will be taken over by the e-Learning Services group at the SWITCH foundation.

Displaying Movies in Vista

These instructions on how to display movies in Vista have been assembled thanks to the friendly help of the eLab team at the University of Lugano.

Table of Contents

• Generalities about playing Movies
• Generalities about playing Movies in a Vista Section
• Playing Movies from the sections File Manager
• Playing Movies from an outside web server
• Advantages and Disadvantages of the different formats
• Examples of AVI, MPEG, WMV, MOV, RM, FLASH in a Vista Course.
• Useful Links

Generalities about playing Movies

Your ability to display movies via Vista on your student's screens depends mostly on the ability of your movies to run in the individual environment that presents your students computer. Will they posses the needed player in the correct version with the exact Codec hopefully in the supported OS and browsers to run the movie format that you have chosen. Read some very concise information about the Advantages and Disadvantages of the different formats. Get more details with the Useful Links below for example about the Codec of your movie.

Generalities about playing Movies in a Vista Section

Movies can be displayed to students in a Vista Section in two ways, the first one of which is very simple but not always satisfactory whereas the second one is more complex but allows to control all aspects of the Movie's execution:

1. through placing the link to the Movie file into the Homepage (tool: Content File), or in another tool such as Learning Module (the Click-This-Link method).
2. through a link embedded in a HTML-page (the Embedded-Object method). This page indicates the location of the Movie file in the section's File Manager, the target application on the student's computer and the parameters of the Movie. Such as:
• where is the source file
• what are the display dimensions
• which application shall open the Movie
• Should the film automatically start running
• Should the control buttons be visible
See a comprehensive description of all parameters.

Concerning method 1 - Click-This-Link:
This method is simple for the course designer since a simple link to the file is sufficient. It is practical for the students, since when they click the link they are asked to choose the player with which to run the Movie. Supposing students know which player is on their machine this makes it quite sure that the movie can be played. The movies thus will be displayed in the player window, not in the course window but in their preset dimension. Overall the aspect of the display will depend on the settings of the players on each student's computer. Run the example at: http://www.edutech.ch/vista/docs/HOWTOs/VIS055E/videos/Demo.rm (Wait for it to start!).

Concerning method 2 - Embedded-Objects:
The movie will be displayed inside the web page which integrates it to the content. The course designer can control all aspects of the way a movie is presented which allows a didactical design.
Run this example:

You might also consider providing your movies both ways to make sure that all students will actually be able to run them.
This code and some of the Movies accessible in the demos have been provided courtesy to Goran Josic from the eLab of the University of Lugano.

Playing Movies from the sections File Manager

If you have uploaded your Movie into a Vista section's File Manager the above example will work fine. Mind you, depending on the file size of your Movie, it can take too much time to download, or if you ask a group of students in a media lab to work on different machines with the same Movie the bandwidth might not be sufficient ...

Playing Movies from an outside web server

You can run movies from an external Web server in the same way as you can run movies stored locally by the two methods described above, that is:

• through placing the direct link to the external Movie file into the Homepage (tool: URL, Content File or in another tool such as Learning Module (again by placing the URL).
• through a link embedded in a HTML-page. This page indicates the location of the Movie file on a web server and the target application on the student's computer as well as the parameters of the movie.

Concerning method 1 - Click-This-Link:
As described above this method links directly to the movie file. The same advantages and disadvantages as explained above apply.

Concerning method 2 - Embedded-Objects:
As described above the code in the HTML-page needs to indicate a number of parameters with variations for Internet Explorer as well as for Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. See below an example of such coding calling for a WMV file "video.wmv" stored on our server at the University of Fribourg.

You might want to let this Embedded Media HTML Generator produce the code for you.

This code and some of the Movies accessible in the demos have been provided courtesy to Goran Josic from the eLab of the University of Lugano.

Advantages and Disadvantages of the different formats

Films in the format:

• Audio Video Interleave - AVI
  Older Format taking too much size if uncompressed and when compressed it can come in a annoying number of different codecs.
• Windows Media Video - WMV
  can be shown easily under windows but are less adapted to Macs and machines with Linux.
• Quicktime - MOV
  work well in the Macintosh world, where as the Quicktime Player is less frequent under Windows.
• Real Media - RM
  are of very good quality, but don't run easily under Linux and are slowly getting replaced by wmv.
• Moving Picture Experts Group - MPEG
  are of very good quality. But there exist quite a number of different MPEG versions, and the students might not have the right player on their machines.

If you want to avoid all this trouble, convert your Movie files to the Flash (Movie) Format. Most machines on any platform already posses the Macromedia flash player and the Flash Movies start running before the whole film is downloaded. Thus their size becomes less of a problem. For an example look at this film on our server through the Click-This-Link method (file size 2,5 MB): Site-Intro.

Examples of Movies in a Vista course

To find examples for AVI, RM, MPEG, MOV, WMV, Flash in a Vista course click under the following link under "Course List" on "Vista Demos - Movie-Demos" Movie-Demos.

Useful Links

• Embedded Media HTML Generator. This generator helps you to produce the code that you can past into your HTML-pages without having to learn how to produce such code.
• Selecting a Media Player. This page helps you to decide in which of the 3 main formats, Quicktime, Real Media or Windows Media Video you should create your Movie.
• Download G-Spot. This application will help you find out which CODEC is used for a given movie.
• Learn how to produce Quicktime Videos. Deutschsprachiger Online Workshop from Martin Vögeli teaching you with practical exercises how to create a Quicktime video.
• The Desk Top Video Handbook On Line ver 15.0. This well organized handbook has a lot of info about the latest video capture cards, digital video editing software, video storage solutions, and digital video.
• Desktop Videos. Comprehensive Site for Desktop Video Creators.
• Digital Video Editing. About the basics of digital video editing and production using Apple's iMovie and Final Cut Pro 3.
• Embedding Movies with Flash. This page presents the basics of Flash and the FlashSound JavaScript API used to embed Movies.
• Switch offers a streaming facility (initially) on a trial basis. This is for free to all the members of the Swiss academic institutions. More details.
• If your films do not need to be keept behind a password you might want to take advantage of the "Google Video"-facility at http://video.google.com/ that allows to publish and link and even embedd into your page with the "Put on site" feature.

Skype us: A. Röllinghoff  R. Brugger