Re: video files on blackboard

Bob Boufford — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:44:00 GMT

Hi,

Learning Management Systems including Blackboard LS/Learn, Blackboard "WebCT" Vista/CE, Desire2Learn, Angel Learning, Moodle, Sakai and many more are all primarily content management system-based web applications that manage files like most other web applications and web servers. So there really is no "best" in terms of video. To Blackboard, it's just content like HTML files, PDFs, Word docs and PowerPoint ppts.

So you really need ask the question, "What video format can the users effectively and efficient play on their systems?"

At my institution, we are encouraging faculty to use a media server that delivers their videos optimized as streaming MPEG-4 formatted for viewing on iPhone/iPod Touch and similar MP4 players. This is based on many of our students want to view videos on mobile devices or laptop computers connected through the University's wireless network. However, your students may have different needs.

We are trying to shift faculty away from storing video content in Blackboard (or any LMS) as the system is not optimized to deliver video. Depending on the video format, in many cases a good chunk of the video needs to be downloaded to the local system first before it will start playing.

Personally, I would recommend streaming MPEG-4 video for viewing on mobile devices. The "high quality iPod" video that has a 640x480 resolution with H.264 codec is a format to consider. There are several tools for converting QuickTime MOV into MPEG-4.

Cheers,

Bob

video files on blackboard

Miroslaw Kaminski — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:43:56 GMT

Our customer is preparing some video files to put in courses on blackboard platform. They have captured some video material at the conference and want to edit it in the format that would be playable on the Blackboard.

Here are some questions they forwarded to me:

They want to publish two types of the video for users with 512 kb/s Internet speed and for those with faster. Could you suggest below answers with two options?

1) What is the best video format to upload on Blackboard? (flv, mov, mpeg)

2) What should be the size of the movie (width x hight)?

3) What is the beatstream?

4) How many frames per second (fps)?

5) What’s the best program to convert the files (they are currently in mov format)?

I would be thankful for your answers.
Kind Regards

System Administrators (IT Pros)

Re: video files on blackboard

video files on blackboard