Issues Displaying Videos on Confluence

[Elizabeth Bedwell]

Hi,

I am currently using a server version of Confluence 5.5.3 and I am having issues adding and displaying videos on basic pages. These videos can not under any circumstances be added to YouTube or any other third party web hosting site, they have to be stored and accessible for Confluence users only. The upload limit on video content has been set to 100MB.

The issues are occurring in both Chrome: Version 39.0.2171.95 m and Internet Explorer: Version 11.0.9.

First the Chrome issue: (using non sensitive video example that is under 30 sec in length)

ChromeVideoIssue.PNG

The first video is a WMV and will not display in Chrome and does not provide any means to be able to do so. The display size is also smaller than the original video.

The second video is an MP4, and will play automatically regardless of setting and is also the wrong size for the original video. It is only playing in Chrome once the QuickTime Plug In has been installed, but disabled. This of course is not practical to ensure everyone else in the office has this same setup.

This is the same page in Internet Explorer:

ExplorerVideoIssue.PNG

The WMV video at the top plays okay (once the user allows the content through IE prompts) and it is closer to the original size of the video. The second video is the MP4 version and appears as this cropped image that will not play or allow for any user interactivity, it appears as a static image.

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These videos were dragged onto the page for Confluence to add automatically, the same issue occurs if I attach the videos and add in the Multimedia Macro from the Macro browser.

We are going to require more videos to be added to our confluence space for demonstrations, research and communication reasons over the coming months. But at present these issues are ensuring that the videos are unwatchable for the average user. 

Has anyone else had similar issues or know what might be going wrong?

We are going to be updating our Confluence version soon anyway, but I would hope that these issues are not related to that as the updates have been coming in rather frequently recently.

Thank you for any help you can give that might shed some light on this matter or resolve it.

Liz

[Stephen Deutsch]

Hi Liz,

I've found that MP4 files are the only ones that can be played cross-browser successfully.  I wrote this user macro:

https://bitbucket.org/stephendeutsch/confluence-user-macros/src/6b54396e45be879bebfd0ff7c0d934c2a6821867/html5video/html5video.vm?at=master

to insert the video into the HTML5 video tag, and then it plays more or less similarly in each browser.

[Elizabeth Bedwell]

Hi, Thank you for a quick response! :) Also thank you for linking me to the Macro you have created, it looks rather handy. However our IT department have a rule for Plugins and Macros, they need to be officially supported or be shown not to cause issues as Confluence updates. I have never added a custom Macro before either? I would like to learn how to a) add them and b) create them myself to avoid these pesky issues with Confluence.