Video Pipeline 1.0 Successes
After more than a year of enabling version 1.0 of the video pipeline, we have successfully:
- mobile enabled over 1100 (out of 1700) courses
- migrated over 61,000 videos
- educated and trained old and new course staff to use the Video Upload page in Studio
Video Pipeline 1.0 Issues
After more than a year of field testing this for (1) new courses and (2) reruns of pipelined courses, we have encountered various issues with the pipeline and its required workflow.
Burden on edX Video Team
Some of which have been a time-consuming burden on the video team who have manually worked around the issues. For example:
- TBD
Errors experienced by Mobile Learners
Some of which have manifested in learner-facing video issues on the released mobile apps. For example, per
| Jira Legacy | ||||||
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- Number of videos with only youtube URLs, and no mobile encodings: 3,411
- Learners are not able to view these videos within the mobile app.
- Number of videos with only web-hosted video URLs, and no mobile encodings: 5,287
- The mobile app will attempt to access these videos, but may continue to spin if the video is large.
- Number of videos explicitly designated as only-on-web (most likely for licensing reasons): 375
- Learners are not able to view these videos within the mobile app.
Scenarios causing Course Teams to Misuse the Pipeline
After some analysis, the following set of scenarios summarize the root cause of the issues:
- Course author updates/adds videos after video migration.
For courses that underwent a transformation using a manual video migration script run by the engineering team, the course staff were never trained to use the Video Upload tool. So then, when they later updated or added videos in the course, they didn't know about the new process and didn't use the Video Upload tool. - Course author updates/adds videos in a Course or in a Course rerun, bypassing the Video Upload tool.
Similar to #1, except for courses that had been using the Video Upload tool. In this case, the video was updated/added by a course author that was unaware or forgot about the process. - Course updated/created in another environment (Edge, OLX, Open edX) and then imported into Prod.
In this case, the course team was using an open edX environment to experiment and create their course content. Once they were ready to start their course, they imported their course into studio.edx.org. However, since there was no video pipeline service available at the time of course creation, the videos in the course were not processed through the pipeline. - Video pipeline integration settings overridden on import on Prod. (
)Jira Legacy server JIRA (openedx.atlassian.net) serverId 13fd1930-5608-3aac-a5dd-21b934d3a4b4 key MA-1302
When a course copy having empty video pipeline settings (e.g., when importing from an open edX environment) is imported onto its Production copy, it overrides any previously stored settings in Production. In this case, video pipeline integration settings are reset and the Video Upload page disappears for that Production course. - Manual entering of Video ID results in incorrect or missed value.
Since the Video Upload page is separated from the Video Authoring content block, course authors are required to (somehow) find the correct corresponding video and then manually copy and paste the corresponding Video ID into the corresponding Video block. This is understandably an error prone process and can lead to unwanted errors. - Manual re-use of Video ID across courses.
When course authors want to reuse the same video across courses, they may manually enter the Video ID of a video that appears in the Video Upload page of another course. Although theoretically allowed, the video abstraction layer (VAL) isn't updated to link the video with the other course. This results in a performance issue since a bulk search for all videos in a course will not include those outliers.
Note/Question: Should we just update the Video Authoring block to update VAL to link to the course whenever a legitimate Video ID is added? - Licensed video not marked as only_on_web.
In some legitimate cases where a video is not meant to have a downloadable reference (e.g., for licensed content), the intention is to mark the video as `only_on_web`. However, this is not made clear in the Video Authoring block and so course teams forget to do so.
Note/Question: Should these videos be marked as 'only_streaming' instead? Now that we have YouTube support on the mobile apps, they can still be streamed using YouTube; just not downloaded.
Video Pipeline 1.5 Plan
While a long-term plan to reassess the edX Asset Pipeline Strategy is under discussion, we plan to address the above issues through tactical short-term measures.
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