Chapter 5 Video Tests

Problem: Video stream content from CT Digital Archives and Trinity Kaltura automatically runs in autoplay mode in web browsers, and I have not yet found a consistent way to block this from happening.

BEFORE TESTING: TEST in both Firefox and Chrome for auto-play issue. Make sure that your browser settings do NOT block autoplay content by default, since we cannot ensure that users will have same browser settings as developers.

Best solution so far: Upload relevant clip to YouTube to display as iframe in web edition, with static image in PDF/Word editions, with caption link and footnote to full video, uploaded for historical preservation to CTDA or Kaltura

Figure 5.1: Here’s a sample YouTube caption, with option to add Markdown links and footnote to full video at CTDA.

Works: Kaltura HTML5 embed avoids autoplay, but is it still supported?

…as shown below in 5.2.¹⁶. See additional oral histories with participants in the Sheff v O’Neill school desegregation lawsuit.¹⁷

Figure 5.2: View the oral history video interview and transcript with Elizabeth Horton Sheff in 2011.

Works but not properly formatted: Kaltura default embed code avoids autoplay

…as shown below in 5.3.This is actually Anne Goldstein.

Figure 5.3: This is actually Anne Goldstein sample video.

Issue Background

Here is an oral history video as displayed on the CTDA site, which does NOT autoplay:

https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/120002:172

Here is the CTDA MP4 video stream for that object, which runs AUTOPLAY in Chrome and FFox for Mac (and perhaps other browsers). CTDA says there is no setting to turn off autoplay from datastreams

https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/120002:172/datastream/MP4

The stream above also works with this “view” ending, but also runs autoplay:

https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/120002:172/datastream/MP4/view

Failed: CTDA iframe with autoplay=false

Here is Bookdown code-chunk that displays CTDA video in web edition, static image in PDF edition, BUT CANNOT TURN OFF AUTOPLAY using the iframe method, even if I add “?autoplay=0” or “?autoplay=false” to the end of the src string, as suggested in Stackoverflow further below.

Figure 5.4: Here’s a sample CTDA video caption, with option to add Markdown link and footnote.

Also tried but did not succeed in adding a “no autoplay” command to the iframe through jQuery in the custom-script.html

Not Bookdown-friendly: HTML5 video tag solution

Here’s a solution using the HTML5 video tag, which inserts user “controls” but omits “autoplay”.

The HMTL5 video tag solution stops autoplay, but it is NOT ideal for Bookdown-generated books because:

Bookdown/knitr does not appear to support the HMTL 5 video tag in the same way as it supports knitr::include_url. I could submit a request to Bookdown to support HTML5 video tag, but it’s not likely to happen soon….
This means that I cannot use Bookdown built-in support for figures using the HMTL5 video tag, such as:
- the if-else statement in the R code-chunk that places the interactive iframe in HTML and the static floating image in the PDF, but the same caption for both
- figure auto-numbering, such as Figure 1.2, 1.3, etc.

Failed: iframe solution with short video clip, stored locally, with custom script - but it autoplays

Figure 5.5: Here’s a sample local video clip caption, with option to add Markdown link and footnote.

An alternative method is to store the video locally and display with HTML5 video tags, with a custom-script to stop auto-play. But Bookdown does not recognize HMTL5, so no figure auto-numbering and captions will be displayed, and therefore not ideal, as described above.

More resources

See Stackoverflow discussions about HTML iframe, HTML5 video, and autoplay:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49256942/how-to-disable-autoplay-video-in-iframe and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31956221/how-to-disable-auto-play-for-local-video-in-iframe

See Google Chrome Developer autoplay policy change in April 2018:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes

See Firefox Developer note for Video HTML5 autoplay:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/video

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, “Oral History Interview on Sheff Vs. O’Neill” (Cities, Suburbs, Schools Project, Trinity College Digital Repository, July 28, 2011), http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cssp_ohistory/16.↩︎
Trinity College Digital Repository Cities Suburbs and Schools Project Archives, accessed July 15, 2019, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cssp_papers/; On The Line Digital Archives, Connecticut Digital Archives, n.d., https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/120002:otl.↩︎

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