Audio and Inline Videos

Hi there. My videos are uploading, but when I upload as inline videos, the app says "this video cannot play". I push okay and the video does play, but not with audio. As a regular video (not inline) it opens in the phones native media viewer and works fine with audio intact. any ideas?

What is the optimal video format? MP4?

Hi Amanda,

To play videos we rely on the native device API's. For many videos the algorithm used to compress the audio is a proprietary "codec" that may not be included in the system OS API for licensing reasons. "AAC/MPEG4" is a commonly found audio codec in MP4 files, for example, which is non-free and requires software licensing to be paid.

How was the video produced? The easiest option would be to transcode the video to use a non-proprietary codec.

-Clayton

Hey Clayton, sorry just getting back to you. The videos were sent to me from the Program team - they were sent in .mp4 or .m4v. They are large so I'd want to downsize anyway. There are so many online converters out there, and I'm not quite clear on the codec thing...

Is there a simple answer to covert to .avi or some other format that generally works best?

Or if codecs are involved, I'll have to google that more...

Hi Amanda,

We have some recommendations on our public wiki. They are a bit old, but the links appear to all still be live.

Unfortunately, there's not always a one-size-fits-all solution. In my (albeit somewhat out of date experience) the Mobile Media Converter on that page had the best track record of producing files that played reliably, but would sometimes down sample too severely. I'd probably start there.

-Clayton

Yes, I've definitely spent time on the Wiki and with Mobile Media Converter. I've simply been converting .m4v or .mp4 so they are smaller. CommCare should support .mp4 right?

MP4 files can be encoded with different options for audio. As long as the audio codec used is unlicensed (IE: Not "AAC/MPEG4"), it should be support by Android phones (and thus CommCare).

-Clayton