Thursday 12 April 2012

Multimedia Filters in Moodle

Do you want YouTube videos to appear on your course home page, or any other page in your course for that matter like this:



without having to worry about things like this:
<embed> or <iframe> html code

or do you want your Flash animations or videos to auto embed like this:
Flash drag and drop exercise embedded in Moodle





when you upload an .swf or an .flv file



...then you need to change the Multimedia Filters setting in your Moodle Site Admin pages

How to change the settings?

First go to your site admin options
Site administration > plugins > filters > manage filters


Second, enable the 'Multimedia Plugins' as below:
enable multimedia plugins




Third, Select the 'settings' to choose what multimedia you want to auto-embed:
Select the sites and extensions from which you wish to enable multimedia auto-embedding




I am amazed by the number of homegrown Moodle environments that do not have these settings enabled. Often people are too scared to mess with the Site Administration settings, lest they 'break' something. This does not mean that the defaults are optimum for everyone, as this one is switched OFF by default.

I cannot think of a good reason why anyone should NOT choose to make this change, which will enable your teachers to transform the look of their Moodle courses by embedding rich media content.

Moodle 2.x (Repositories)

If you have M2.x installed, you can even add YouTube, and Flickr as 'repositories' which appear in the file picker like this:
M2.x File Picker




You can search an external repository, YouTube and Flickr in this case, and bring the files back into your course page (auto embedded in the case of YouTube and other video sharing sites)

How to enable the repositories in M2.x?

First go to your Site Admin > Plugins > Repositories:
Site Admin > Plugins > Repositories


 Second choose the list of repositories that you wish to search from (some are on default M2.x; others you can install manually):
Manage Repositories page in M2.x Site Admin




The 'enabled and visible' repositories will appear on your file picker site wide.

Please comment on this post if there is more to add or if I have missed something.











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