Attaching videos to Confluence pages

[Bhakti Paranjpe]

Hey fellow Confluence users, 

I want to get your thoughts about attaching multimedia content such as videos and gifs directly to Confluence pages.

• Do you attach files directly to Confluence pages or host the videos elsewhere and provide links?
• Video and gif file sizes are usually big - a few MBs to a few hundred MBs. Does attaching them to the page impact the performance of your Confluence instance?
• What is the best approach to add multimedia content to Confluence pages?

Looking forward to thoughts/opinions/best practices.

Cheers! 

[Davin Studer]

You can attach videos directly to a page however, that can have an impact on the loading of your page. Typically, I found found, when people do this they tend to not know much about video over the the internet and post HUGE video files to the page. This is super inefficient and takes bandwidth away from your server that it could be devoting to other connections. Keep in mind that Confluence isn't designed to be a video streaming platform. When you download a video from Confluence it downloads all of it as fast as it can. When you watch a video of a streaming service such as YouTube or Netflix you don't download the whole video at once. The streaming service will send the video to as you need it. If you pause the video or stop the video you are never sent the part that you didn't get to. Also, these streaming services are designed to adaptively change the quality of the stream and your bandwidth goes up or down. They also compress the heck out of the stream to send you the smallest file possible at the best quality possibly.

Confluence can do none of those things. It just dump the whole file to your machine as fast as it can at the detriment of other  connections. This may not be a big deal if one  person is watching the 700+MB video, but when you get multiple people trying to watch it at the same  time you can quickly bring your system to a crawl.

All this to say if the video is pretty small you may be able to get away with it, but if not you should look at putting the video on a streaming platform and simply embed a widget on the page that shows the video. If you don't want to make you video publicly accessible there are applications that allow you to host your own video streaming application on your network.

[Kiran Panduga {Appfire}]

Hi @Bhakti Paranjpe , 

For large files(Videos, GIF, etc) you can attach the files to the confluence page and use the Multimedia Macro which helps in configure the width, Height of the video to be displayed in the Confluence page.

Thanks,

Kiran.

[Isabella Mitchell]

Thanks Haran, I did use the Widget Connector on 2 separate pages with 2 separate Vimeo videos and one time it shows up as a URL link and the other time it shows up a thumbnail video. I need to understand why the difference.

[Haran Kumar]

Hi @Bhakti Paranjpe 

When it comes for Pictures and Gif , you can directly add them to the confluence page by importing them .  Even small size video's can be done . But for all high resolution and long video the size of file attached may cause the lag in loading the page , so its better to provide a link ( Google drive link) n such cases. 

Yet you can always use the multimedia content directly in confluence pages. 

Regards
Haran

[Annette Kramer]

I would love to here about add-ins or stand alone products as well.  We are looking to build out our training platform and I wonder if anyone has gound one that aligns well with Confluence for publishing Help Videos 

[Bhakti Paranjpe]

Thank you for the detailed reply, Davin. It really helps a lot. 

Can you recommend any applications for video streaming that go well with Confluence Cloud? Thanks.