In this video we will walk through the configuration options for the Video module. Along the way, I will change some of the default settings to ones that better suit my preferences.

Video Settings

  • Go to “Configuration => Media => Video” (admin/config/media/video)

General

There are really two sections here. The first two options have to do with how a video behaves when a user loads a page with a video on it. The rest have to do with what to do when you are posting a video.

  • Automatically start video on page load (This does what it says. When the page loads, it will automatically start playing the video. Be especially careful with this when you will have more than one video on a page!)
  • Automatically start video buffering (This will start buffering the video when the pages loads.)
  • Bypass video conversion (If you will be converting videos to the appropriate format before you upload them, you can choose to bypass video conversion. This will prevent your videos from being sent to Zencoder and Amazon S3 and serve the video from your server. *This can be overridden on an individual video basis, when you post a video.)
  • Video convert on node submit (By default, videos will be sent to Zencoder according to the cron settings, which we will get to when we visit the "Scheduling" tab. Using this setting however, we can send each video to Zencoder when we save each node, instead of waiting for cron to send it. *This can also be overridden on an individual video basis, when you post a video.)
  • Override video thumbnails with default thumbnail (If you choose to use a default thumbnail for your videos, you can use this option to force that thumbnail to be used for all videos.)
  • Publish when conversion complete (This is now fully controlled by rules, and I'll show you how to configure this in another video.)
  • Available dimensions for converting and displaying videos (These are the dimensions that you’ll be able to use for your videos. I’m going to add one smaller than those available so that I can use it in the video gallery that we’ll create in a later video.)
    • Add “160x120” to the top of the list

Players

This is where you will set which player to use for each video extension. I'm going to have Zencoder convert everything to .mp4, so that's the only one I'm going to worry about.

  • Extension mp4: HTML5 Player (This is what I would recommend to ensure the widest possible compatibility. i.e.: desktop and mobile browsers.)

Transcoders

  • Zencoder (Create your Zencoder account here. Enter your information, and follow the instructions that follow. Especially make sure that you write down the password, or better yet, log in now and change it to something you will remember! I'll go ahead and do that now.)
  • Number of thumbnails (This is the number of thumbnails that Zencoder will create for you to choose from. This does not affect what the end user will see. We will see this in action when we actually upload our first video.)
  • Dimension of thumbnails (These are the dimensions that Zencoder will use when exporting the thumbnails)
  • Postback URL for Zencoder (Do not change the post back URL for Zencoder)

Presets

  • Use preset dimensions for video conversion (This will force all videos to use the dimensions set in each preset. For example, if we click "edit" next to the mp4 preset, and scroll down, we see that the dimensions are set to 640x480. This means that every mp4 video will be displayed at 640x480. I'm going to increase that to 1280x720 so that any hd videos I upload will still look good. And I'm not going to check the Upscale box, so that my lower quality videos will keep their dimensions.)
  • [x] mp4 (I'm going to use mp4, again, for compatibility with mobile devices.)

Scheduling

  • Finally, this is where you can configure the length of time a video is allowed to spend transcoding before it times out, as well as how many videos to convert during each cron process.