Videos in Omeka

Greetings,

Sorry for the simple question, what is the best practice for videos in Omeka? Is it recommended to host them on a 3rd party site (e.g., YouTube)? Or do you typically upload videos directly to Omeka?

Thank you,
Doug

It really depends on your situation, traffic, size of the videos, that kind of thing.

Omeka S can render videos you directly upload with the standard browser video tag, but it won’t do things that YouTube and the other streaming sites will do, like transcode the video to different formats and resolutions for different devices and connection bandwidths (at least some of this can be done through modules, but it’s not nearly as seamless of an experience). The video hosts will also cover the bandwidth for people actually viewing the videos rather than it coming from your server, of course.

The filpside is some reduced control over your own data, you’re subject to Google’s or whoever’s policies, data collection, things like that. In Omeka Classic, using something like YouTube meant it was treated differently by the system and couldn’t be easily used in the same ways as “real” uploaded files. For Omeka S, this isn’t really a concern anymore as better support for externally-hosted media was a significant focus for S.

Note that there is a module that converts the audio/video into different formats and all of them added in the html, so the browser can choose the better one : Derivative Media.

The only point to check with this module is the fact that the creation of derivative formats is cpu-intensive and can slow the server. So the derivative formats can be done outside too.

Thank you for the information.

I also have a question about the integration of videos in combination with Universalviewer. Unfortunately, the viewer does not display the videos in the format OGV (and other formats just as not). Without the Universalviewer module the OGV file is displayed correctly in the browser. According to the documentation the viewer should be able to display videos.
I suspect that either the IIIF manifest is incorrect or there is a JavaScript error. There is also an issue on gitlab about this:

Has anyone successfully added videos to items and played them with universalviewer?

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