Basics of Video in DIVA

Having traveled from magnetic tape to pizza sized discs to smaller toaster-treat-sized discs, here we are again on the edge of a new video medium: digitally distributed. With education increasingly becoming more web centric, the streaming media directly to a user's browser has become essential. DIVA provides the ability for you to upload your video materials to share with your students and colleagues. This guide goes over the basic concepts and best practices you'll want to know to use video in DIVA.

We use a powerful "transcoder" program to take any video format you upload and convert it to a MPEG-4 h.264 video (.mp4) so that users can play it within the browser. Since DIVA supports nearly every open video format and most of the proprietary videos, it is likely that any files you already have will work when uploaded to DIVA. File size becomes an issue with many videos. Consider this: Any file you want to share with your students and collaborators will have to be reachable to them from home. As such, any large file that takes you a long time to upload, will take a long time for students and collaborators to download. If you're concerned about losing video quality, we recommend using the h.264 codec yourself to encode your video before uploading it to DIVA. The process to do this requires a powerful computer and specialized software that varies for each platform. Feel free to email the DIVA Support Team (ilearn@sfsu.edu) for information on what software to purchase. For best results, shoot all video in a horizontal, or landscape, orientation.

DIVA Video Player Overview

You can watch videos on DIVA using our web player. 

1. Play button - The primary play button. It only displays when the video is paused or has not started.
2. Progress bar - The gray bar indicates how much of the video has loaded, while a colored bar appears indicating your position in the video.
3. Play/Pause and Timestamp - These are your main video controls and metadata including the length of the video and your precise position.
4. CC - Closed Captions, when available, can be toggled here.
5. Volume - Control the video's volume. Click the speaker icon to mute the video entirely.
6. Fullscreen - Fullscreen video is supported when watching video on DIVA's site. 

DIVA supports closed-captions on videos. We are developing a guide for closed-captioning video. The Caption It Yourself project provides information on digital captioning and provides information on how to create Timed Text XML captions yourself that will be compatible with DIVA.

It is required that you have adequate legal permission for any of the files you upload into DIVA. Any content reported in violation of an existing Copyright will be investigated and may be removed.