Download video first before proceed

ssoni · January 20, 2021

We have users with VPN or slow connection in the company. The video content is too skipping to watch. Is there a way to stay at the first page, the course downloads all the identified videos, and alert the users of download finished and ready to go?

Any help would be really appreciated.

Regards

Soni

carlfink · January 20, 2021

Technically, this is known as preloading. For some reason, the HTML5 video players absolutely will not let you preload entire videos in any obvious way.

andrew-robertson · February 4, 2021

Hey @ssoni, is this on a corporate LAN or over the internet? We've implemented a pretty slick solution to support our less then optimal sites across our geographically diverse country/operations.

Also, I did a quick search on how to pre-load content and you should look at the link below.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Preloading_content

Specifically this code:

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Video preload example</title>

  <link rel="preload" href="sintel-short.mp4" as="video" type="video/mp4">
  <link rel="preload" href="sintel-short.webm" as="video" type="video/webm">
</head>
<body>
  <video controls>
    <source src="sintel-short.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    <source src="sintel-short.webm" type="video/webm">
    <p>Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video. Here is a <a href="sintel-short.mp4">link to the video</a> instead.</p>
  </video>
</body>

carlfink · February 5, 2021

andrew-robertson said:
Hey @ssoni, is this on a corporate LAN or over the internet? We've implemented a pretty slick solution to support our less then optimal sites across our geographically diverse country/operations.

Unfortunately, "preload" doesn't in general preload the entire file, at least as described by the docs. It makes the specified resource high-priority (starts that download higher in the list of "things the browser needs to fetch") but it doesn't do what preloading used to in Flash days, and actually download the entire thing before starting play, guaranteed. See:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36641137/how-exactly-does-link-rel-preload-work

andrew-robertson · February 25, 2021

Hmm. Good to know... Either way, to off load our needs to send content from one end of the country to the other, we deployed a dedicated web-server to every site which then provides the media content when the user's session asks for it. This allows for all media (99% of the time video/audio) to be pulled locally as opposed from our centralized datacenter - it really removes the strain on our WAN and the trunks that go into/out of the sites.

carlfink · February 26, 2021

andrew-robertson said:
Hmm. Good to know... Either way, to off load our needs to send content from one end of the country to the other, we deployed a dedicated web-server to every site which then provides the media content when the user's session asks for it. This allows for all media (99% of the time video/audio) to be pulled locally as opposed from our centralized datacenter - it really removes the strain on our WAN and the trunks that go into/out of the sites.

You built a corporate internal CDN?

andrew-robertson · February 26, 2021

carlfink said:
You built a corporate internal CDN?

Kinda.

At every site we had our IT Department spool up a dedicated IIS Webserver for us to pull our content from. It requires me to go in and modify the audio/video URL in the Lectora published HTML files (./media/file.mp3 to https://locallms/course/language/file.mp3). I do know that our IT folks have setup a nice process when we are ready to push our content out for mass consumption (after testing has finished).

I know this isn't a "true scorm package" and probably shouldn't be done, but we have to do it to make sure our content doesn't cause issues on the smaller network trunks to sites that also need the bandwidth. Meaning it allows us to push the 500mb once to a site as opposed to it being pulled for every user's session (content stays internal to the site as opposed to going through the WWW).

carlfink · February 28, 2021

Have you considered caching proxy servers at each location? I haven't been a full-time sysadmin for ... damn, I'm old ... for decades now, but in the early 2000s I would have used Squid.

andrew-robertson · March 1, 2021

Hmm. I will have to suggest that to my IT folks. They are typically hesitant to try anything new.

I've always wanted to get an LMS that supports offsite learning such as SABA. From what I hear you can plug a bunch of laptops in (or PCs), and then take them off site. You can then load the content, and it stores everything for a future sync with the servers.

carlfink · March 1, 2021

Many LMSes will do that, but if you include streaming video/audio in the eLearning it defeats the function.

Download video first before proceed

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