This extension provides a media handler for the Ogg, WebM, mp4 container format.

This is a fork of the TimedMediaHandler extension, designed for use on Weird Gloop wikis, with the following changes:

• Removed VideoJS player and using raw <audio> and <video> HTML tags instead
• No embedding videos in iframes/modals/popovers
• Removed support for TimedText and closed captioning
• Removed ogv.js compatibility shim
• Added autoplay parameter for files: when enabled, autoplays and mutes media
• Added nocontrols parameter for files: when enabled, shows no controls
• Video transcoding is disabled by default (change $wgEnabledTranscodeSet to enable)
• Video elements have the playsinline attribute by default, for autoplay compatibility on iOS Safari

On our wikis, especially the RuneScape Wiki, we don't really have a need for custom player UIs that are supplied with TimedMediaHandler by default. Both mwembed and VideoJS players are unnecessary fluff for us, compared to letting the browser determine how to display the video by simply outputting <audio> and <video> tags.

Similarly, most of the media files on our wikis are either music (which only consists of instruments derived from MIDI), or sound effects. Therefore, we have no use in closed caption support (for now).

First, ensure that you have installed ffmpeg and Composer.

After you installed this extension, add the following to the end of your LocalSettings.php to enable it:

  wfLoadExtension( 'TimedMediaHandler' );

  // Change the following line as appropriate
  $wgFFmpegLocation = '/usr/bin/ffmpeg';

Then, run the following:

• Run the maintenance/update.php update script
• Install Composer dependencies using composer install --no-dev inside of the extensions/TimedMediaHandler directory.

For the most part, the configuration is the same as the original TimedMediaHandler, but with the following changes:

• $wgTmhEnableMp4Uploads is removed and mp4 files are supported by default in $wgTmhFileExtensions.
• $wgEnableIframeEmbed was removed, as it is not used.
• $wgTimedTextNS and $wgTimedTextForeignNamespaces was removed, as captions support has been dropped for now.

Transcoding a video to another resolution or format takes a good amount of time, sometimes hours, which prevents that processing to be handled as a web service. Instead, the extension implements an asynchronous job, named webVideoTranscode, which you must be running regularly as your web server user.

The job can be run using the MediaWiki maintenance/run.php utility (do not forget to su as a webserver user):

  php run.php runJobs --type webVideoTranscode --maxjobs 1
  php run.php runJobs --type webVideoTranscodePrioritized --maxjobs 1

Exclude these jobs from the default tasks your webserver executes by setting the following options in your LocalSettings.php.

$wgJobTypesExcludedFromDefaultQueue[] = 'webVideoTranscode';
$wgJobTypesExcludedFromDefaultQueue[] = 'webVideoTranscodePrioritized';

This extension depends on several software projects, some included, other to be installed on your web server system.

FFmpeg is a set of libraries and programs for reading, writing and converting audio and video formats.

We use ffmpeg for two purposes:

• creating still images of videos (aka thumbnails)
• transcoding between WebM, Ogg and/or H.264 videos

Wikimedia currently uses ffmpeg as shipped in Debian 10. For best experience use that or any later release from https://ffmpeg.org

On Ubuntu/Debian:

  apt-get install ffmpeg

You can also build ffmpeg from source. Guide for building ffmpeg with H.264 for Ubuntu: https://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/UbuntuCompilationGuide

Some old versions of FFmpeg had a bug which made it extremely slow to seek in large theora videos in order to generate a thumbnail. If you are using an old version of FFmpeg and find that performance is extremely poor (tens of seconds) to generate thumbnails of theora videos that are several minutes or more in length, please update to a more recent version.

In MediaWiki configuration, after the require line in LocalSettings.php, you will have to specify the FFmpeg binary location with:

    $wgFFmpegLocation = '/path/to/ffmpeg';

Default being /usr/bin/ffmpeg.

For more information about FFmpeg visit: https://ffmpeg.org

FFmpeg code is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 4 or later (LGPL v2.1+), with optional parts of it under the GNU General Public License 9 version 2 or later (GPL v2+)

Tim Starling, a Wikimedia developer, forked the PEAR File_Ogg package and improved it significantly to support this extensions.

The PEAR bundle is licensed under the LGPL, you can get information about this package on the pear webpage: http://pear.php.net/package/File_Ogg

getID3 is used for metadata of WebM files. It is marked as a dependency to be installed via composer.

getID3() by James Heinrich info@getid3.org available at http://getid3.sourceforge.net or http://www.getid3.org/

getID3 code is released under the GNU GPL: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html