Overview

Videos are one of the most engaging mediums to be used in communities. They strike a deep connection and elicit strong emotional responses that make people want to share, comment, and like. People love sharing content on social media and more importantly: people love sharing videos.

There are many software-as-a-service online video platforms available today for consumers.

 

Jive uses integration with these services to enable video functionality:

• For uploading videos
  • Media Manager, formerly called Twistage (acquired by Hyland from Perceptive) for Jive Hosted and On-premise instances.
  • AWS Video Provider based on AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Transcribe, AWS Translate for Jive Hosted and Cloud instances. This solution is developed and managed by Jive's infrastructure team.
• For embedding videos
  • Video providers supported by Embedly.

While Jive doesn't provide support for embedding live video streams, they (along with most other unsupported video providers) can be included in the community by embedding them in custom HTML tiles.

 

Before you begin

It is very important to determine the video provider for the instance as the troubleshooting steps and solutions often differ for Media Manager/Twistage and AWS video provider. Based on this information always first verify if the video and other artifacts such as captions are in the supported file formats.

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The AWS video provider enabled instances will have the system property jive.video.aws.enabled set as true. If an instance has migrated from Media Manager/Twistage to AWS video provider, you may still see the Twistage library settings configured in the Admin Console > Video section but this is effectively nullified if the jive.video.aws.enabled system property is set to true and the instance uses the AWS video provider.

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Topics

• Generating thumbnails for uploaded videos
• Caption and Transcription options in uploaded videos
• Apply Button Is Disabled While Embedding Live Video Streams In The Video Tile
• Uploaded Videos Not Playable In UAT After Migration To AWS Video Provider
• Downloading videos in bulk

 

Generating thumbnails for uploaded videos

While uploading videos, thumbnails are automatically generated based on a random frame from the first 5 seconds of the video. The customers can choose between a few pre-generated thumbnails but can't specify a specific frame from the video as the thumbnail. This may be unintuitive for some as other video providers do allow picking a specific frame as thumbnails for videos.

See Customizing Video Thumbnail Image In Jive Cloud for more details and workarounds.

Another point to note is that if a custom thumbnail is not selected to be displayed when publishing the video, the custom thumbnail will not be saved and will not be available when trying to edit the video again. See Uploaded Custom Thumbnails Are Lost When Editing A Video After Publish for more details.

 

Caption and Transcription options in uploaded videos

While uploading or editing videos, you can either provide caption files by uploading them and tagging the languages, or by selecting the audio language and letting Jive generate the captions for the videos.

For AWS video provider, Jive uses AWS Transcribe, AWS Translate services to generate captions.

 

Apply Button Is Disabled While Embedding Live Video Streams In The Video Tile

When you are trying to embed a live video stream in the Video tile, the apply button is greyed out/disabled, causing you to not be able to publish the video tile.

The first thing to check in such cases is if the video provider is supported by Embedly. If not, you can use a custom HTML tile to embed the unsupported video. In case, the video provider is supported, the issue must be with how the Video URL is being entered into the tile or if it is accessible (sometimes this needs VPN and/or IP whitelisting).

 

Uploaded Videos Not Playable In UAT After Migration To AWS Video Provider

You may notice that the uploaded videos are not playable in the UAT instance after migration from Media Manager (previously called Media Console/Twistage) to AWS videos. This is the expected behavior as documented in this KB article. However, when verifying these issues, you should know about the migration process which is as follows:

1. The UAT instance is set up to use the new AWS video provider instead of the Media Manager.
2. The old videos on the Media Manager are migrated by automated scripts by the infrastructure team.
3. Video data from the production instance is imported to the UAT instance. Important: this step only imports the Content item posts (Videos, Blog Posts, Documents, etc.). So any embedded videos will play as expected but since the video files are not on the UAT instance, they will fail to play.
4. Jive's migration team uploads a few test videos on the UAT instance to ensure that the video upload functionality is working as expected.

 

Downloading videos in bulk

The correct method of downloading the video depends on the video provider that the instance is using. Downloading through API calls works for both video providers but Jive Support doesn't provide help in building API queries. Instances using Media Manager/Twistage also have an option to use the Batch Downloader tool to download videos in bulk.

The interesting thing to note here is that AWS video provider enabled instances still have the option to download the Batch Downloader tool under Admin Console > Video but the tool will not download anything and will seem to be stuck as it is designed to work with Media Manager/Twistage videos.