I'm happy to report that more than a year later, we've now developed a new 
Video XBlock together with Raccoon Gang that solves many of the problems 
that I cited back in my original post. Thanks to InterSystems 
<http://www.intersystems.com> and Open University <http://www.open.ac.uk> 
for their generous sponsorship contributions to make this development work 
possible.

You can read a detailed overview of the Video XBlock features and what it 
provides beyond the built-in video module, in this blog post: 
https://appsembler.com/blog/deliver-videos-securely-open-edx-courses-new-video-xblock/

To summarize, the key features of this new Video XBlock are:

   - Secure video hosting using Brightcove, Wistia, Vimeo (Brightcove, 
   Wistia* and Vimeo* video content can be added simply by pasting the URL)
   - Video encryption using Brightcove (use Brightcove 
   - 3PlayMedia <http://www.3playmedia.com/> integration to fetch subtitles 
   that are stored at 3PlayMedia
   - Speed up / slow down controls
   - Set start / end time
   - Captions and interactive transcript (like the one that comes with Open 
   edX) including downloadable transcripts
   - Downloadable handouts
   - Upload subtitle files or retrieve default ones
   - Ability to specify a particular Brightcove player ID on a per-block 
   basis.
   - “Pluggable” backend meaning that additional video hosting providers 
   can be added

We'd love for you to try out the XBlock and give us feedback! If you're a 
developer, we encourage you to get the latest code from Github 
<https://github.com/appsembler/xblock-video> and contribute bug fixes or 
new features. 

Lastly, if you like what you see and would like to help fund further 
development, please join Intersystems and Open University as sponsors of 
the Video XBlock. This will allow us to add more complete support for other 
video hosting providers such as Wistia, Vimeo, Ooyala, Kaltura, etc and 
make the XBlock work with the iOS and Android mobile apps, . Contact me 
offline to learn about the different sponsorship levels.

Oh, and you're at the Open edX conference this week, please come to our 
lightning 
talk <https://openedx2017.sched.com/event/9zf6/lightning-talks> at 13.00 
CEST on Thursday, May 25 in room 4.1.D03 or tune in virtually on the Youtube 
stream <https://youtube.com/c/openedx>. We'll also host a birds of a 
feather session on thursday afternoon during the afternoon coffee break 
(room TBD).

thanks,
Nate

On Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at 12:09:03 PM UTC+1, Leonardo Salom wrote:
>
> I'm also interested in how this subject evolves.
>
> El viernes, 5 de febrero de 2016, 0:34:06 (UTC+1), Nate Aune escribió:
>>
>> In many of our customer engagements, we find ourselves having 
>> conversations with customers who want:
>>
>> 1) to secure their videos (which means Youtube is not an option)
>> 2) to use the edX video player (because they like the speed up/slow down 
>> and interactive transcript support)
>> 3) to have the adaptive bitrate so that the videos play back optimally 
>> according to the user's device and bandwidth (which means S3 is not an 
>> option)
>>
>> Afaik, these 3 things are mutually exclusive which means that our 
>> customers are stuck between foregoing the use of the edX video player and 
>> using a native player like Wistia, Brightcove or Vimeo (none of which have 
>> an interactive transcript), or using the native edX video player but 
>> risking that their videos are publicly exposed (if they use Youtube), or 
>> foregoing adaptive bitrate support (if they use S3).
>>
>> I'm wondering if others have found good solutions to address these 
>> limitations. It seems like there are several options:
>>
>> 1) Extend the edX video player to support players other than Youtube or 
>> S3, like Wistia, Brightcove, Vimeo which all let you protect the video 
>> content by domain/IP restriction.
>> 2) Make the edX video player able to negotiate with the client to serve 
>> an appropriate video file (HD, SD depending on the bandwidth and device). 
>> That way, you could at least upload the various renditions to S3, and the 
>> video player would figure out which one to use during playback, or at the 
>> very least, the student could manually select their preference as a profile 
>> setting.
>> 3) Build a new XBlock video player, using something like Wistia as the 
>> backend, and use Wistia's API to:
>>     a) send student IDs from Open edX to Wistia for reporting purposes
>>     b) index the transcripts so that they appear in the edX search
>>
>> I've already had a phone call with the CTO of Wistia (which happens to be 
>> a Boston-based company) about option #3, and he is willing to put some 
>> engineering support behind such an effort. The Wistia engineers obviously 
>> don't know Open edX, but could provide assistance on the Wistia API side.
>>
>> Are there other folks on this list who would be interested in exploring 
>> one of these options, and even putting some money behind it?  We can 
>> probably get a customer or two to co-fund the efforts, but it might be a 
>> lot of work, so we want to gauge demand and support before proceeding.
>>
>> Nate
>>
>

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