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Linking

A brief guide to linking to your streaming media. Read on, or alternatively you can watch a full motion tutorial of these steps.

A Little Background

In order to succesfully deploy your streaming media, you'll need to do more than make a regular link to the file as you would a PDF or Word document. In order to control the presentation and give your users the best experience, you'll need to use very specific HTML code. Each type of media may require different sets of code. It all becomes very complicated, very quickly. Below are instructions for using JMUtube, a flash-based player we developed to make it easier for instructors to deploy internet video.

This guide assumes your files have already been uploaded.

Using This Website Generate HTML Code

After having a CIT staff member upload your videos to the streaming server, visit http://streaming.jmu.edu and click the "My Account" button. Sign in using your JMU e-ID and password. Once you sign in, you will see a list of your videos on the streaming server.

CIT video production services will create a Flash file for you unless otherwise instructed.

To build a JMUtube playlist, check the "include" box next to each video you wish to add. After toggling the Include box, you can choose which position you would like your video to appear in the player (first, second, third, etc.) You can also Delete, Rename, or Preview any of the videos you have on the streaming server using the appropriate button. Once you have selected the videos you would like to include, press the "build playlist" button.

Many times you will have see two options for your videos, a _hi and a _lo. If you see this, choose the _hi version. This allows users to select between a high quality stream and a low quality stream depending on their bandwidth. The default for JMUtube is the high quality version.

HTML code will appear in the box near the bottom of your screen. You need to select this code (it's usually best to use Edit->Select All to make sure you don't accidentally miss something) and copy it (Edit->Copy).

Pasting Your Code in Blackboard

The code can now be pasted anywhere you like, but we'll assume for this that you'd like to place the video in Blackoboard. Blackboard's Visual Text Editor can alter some of the code you paste in, causing it to fail. So we recommend turning it off when working with video. You can find instructions for doing so on the CIT FYI Blog.

Once you've turned off the Visual Text Editor, navigate to place where you'd like to add the video and click on Edit View in the upper right-hand corner. Then choose + Item from the toolbar.

Add Item in Blackboard

In the resulting window, you can give your document any title you like. You will then need to paste your copied code into the Text box. Make sure that you also switch the Text box to HTML mode as pictured below.

Pasting Code Into Blackboard

And that's it! Click Submit and you should see your player as expected.