Skip to main content

The Kaltura API

I've been researching the Kaltura API and have discovered a few things. The first thing is that the documentation is there, but it is terribly organized (in my opinion). I have done a lot more Googling to find information on what I want to do with the Kaltura API than even figuring out how to write the code. As a side note, I've been researching with the Kaltura.com trial account (which eventually becomes their commercial, hosted account, I think). I did try to get their Kaltura.org (community edition) set up on an AWS instance, but the poor instance was pretty underpowered and would time out too much.

One thing I tried to do today was try to get the Kaltura video player to default to HTML5 first, before trying the Flash player. The HTML5 configuration page (http://html5video.org/wiki/Kaltura_HTML5_Configuration) should have put some clear information on how to do this, but including the mwEmbedLoader.php didn't work. The Flash version still loaded. I checked the url that I was including for loading the correct library files, and it was correct. Finally, I got my clue, which was really vague:

http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/p/{partnerId}/sp/{partnerId}00/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/{uiConfId}/partner_id/{partnerId} is the version of the library that kaltura.com SaaS offering points to. This is the url you will get from the KMC, when enable html5 onpreview and embed. If your a kaltura customer you should use this url. You can control what version of the html5 library it points to via uiConf"

What I ended up doing was logging into the KMC account, then going to the Players and configuring a custom player (which, after it's saved, has a uiConfId). The Flash Player studio is different from the Universal Studio, so to get the HTML5/Flash compatible player, I configured the Player in the Universal Studio, then plugged the uiConf into my app.

It worked. Guess how long it took me to figure this out. 2 days.

But why didn't the docs even say anything about how to actually do that? All the examples that are given are pretty unhelpful -- they just state the obvious. The other stuff that you really want to do, beyond just clicking a button to get the embed code, requires a lot of Googling and trial & error.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The end of summer

It's been a wild year. Gains and losses. COVID-19 and the shelter in place. Lately, fires. Today was a very dark day, literally. For about half the daylight hours, there was so much ash in the air that it looked like it was close to sunset, but it was definitely not anywhere near as beautiful. Red sun following us everywhere. Bubonic plague found on fleas in Lake Tahoe. The list goes on and on. Everyone is tired. Exhausted. Burnt out. There is no respite, just a new normal that seems like an even steeper climb than before. Sleep gives way to another day with no refreshment. Yes, that's how things seem. But there have also been bright moments. Time spent with family, especially with the little one. Growing and nurturing plants, building things, trying new recipes, going to the store to shop for dinner, reading books, coloring with crayons... We grow closer together, weaving together a blanket of love and memories that we wrap ourselves in.

Resizing /root partition in Debian 7 (Wheezy)

I've usually been afraid to do anything drastic with the underlying filesystem because of how many times I've messed up the filesystem to begin with, and also because of how much time it takes to reinstall everything. This time, I decided that it was ok to go ahead and take a little risk here. My Linux machine is an old X61s, and its purpose is for me to experiment and learn more about Linux. I started getting a message that I was running low on space on root. Sure enough, the 300MB was all used up. I was hoping that GPartEd could help me with resizing the partitions. I couldn't see the partitions because it was all under an lvm. My plan was to shrink /opt slightly, then grow root. Thankfully, the formula isn't too bad, but there are a few steps. The first link I resorted to was this one: http://blog.shadypixel.com/how-to-shrink-an-lvm-volume-safely/. I didn't reboot to resize /opt; I just resized it after unmounting it. Unmount /opt:   # umount /dev/chrono...