Video File Thumbnails and placement issues

Omeka S
1

Hello All,
I am running an installation if Omeka S with a modified version of The Daily theme.

I recently working with some from the forum to have the default viewer display other media formats; in that case, the specific targets were PDF’s and Audio Files. His solutions are working wonderfully for me.

After I wrapped that up, I decided to plan for any video-based projects. Because there are so many things that could be going wrong, I decided to open a new topic for it.

So I created a testing site and uploaded an MP4 file. My first attempt was just a blank box, so I tried again with smaller file size, and then it did load and play.

  1. Where would I look to view and manage the settings server-side that cause a large file upload to fail?

  2. Thumbnail did not generate. Not a dealbreaker, but would like to know if that is fixable.
    image

  3. On the Item page, the video is displaying great. However, it is not centered? The default viewer for other formats stretches across the whole page. Again not a deal-breaker, I have made so much progress with making this theme friendly to all the formats, I can leave this go if necessary.
    Item Link:
    https://omeka-s.bapl.org/s/Testing/item/44959

    image
    image.jpg1881×771 208 KB

2

Thumbnail generation is a factor of your server’s software. In particular, in addition to ImageMagick you generally also need the program ffmpeg installed to make thumbnails of videos.

The large file… how large? By “blank box” you mean where the player should have been there was a blank box, or that you got a completely white screen instead of an Omeka page? If the software generally worked, as in had no error messages, it’s pretty unlikely that the upload just failed. It’s possible to have a video that uploads fine but won’t actually play in any browsers (or just in some browsers, for that matter).

If your failed example file is something you could share, that could help clear things up.

Oh, and the issue with the size/placement of the video is definitely fixable: it’s just going to be some specific CSS style that needs to be created or edited. As a first stab, try adding:

.media-render video {
    display: block;
    max-width: 100%;
    margin: 0 auto;
}
1 Like
3

I always ask this, where do I add this bit of code? The item layout file or the css file?

4

It would go in the CSS file.

5

Thank you, your code is working perfectly!