Filters/rtmp

The RTMP streaming media filter is used to replace links containing URLs beginning with rtmp:// with a Flowplayer media player using their rtmp plugin. It is contributed by Lacey Vickery and Fred Woolard.

Page output is examined for anchor href values beginning with rtmp:// and ending with a supported extension (currently .mp3, .mp4, .flv,, .f4v, and .mov). Qualifying links are replaced with a span tag containing 'data-' prefixed attributes that are subsequently used by the plugin's JavaScript module to apply a Flowplayer player to the span. The Adobe Flash Player browser plugin is required.

The plugin was developed to work with Adobe's Flash Media Server, but according to Flowplayer, their RTMP plugin should work with Wowza, and Red5 as well. The plugin has been tested successfully with Amazon's Cloudfront streaming service.

Installation

• Select the correct version of the filter_rtmp.zip plugin for your Moodle installation.
• Unpack the .zip file into the filter/ folder of your Moodle site.
• Access the notifications page (Site administration->Notifications) to initiate installation.
• Enable and configure the plugin (Site administration->Plugins->Filters->Manage filters).

How to use

In places where you can enter HTML (e.g. wysiwyg editor for topic summary, page resource, etc.), create a link and supply a URL that references the media stream you want to play. The URL would look something like: rtmp://fms.example.org/vod/classes/lecture01.flv

The file extensions filtered are: .flv, .mp4, .f4v, .mov, and .mp3

Cloudfront Streams

Amazon's Cloudfront streaming requires the Flowplayer config values for netConnectionUrl, and the clip's URL to be slightly different. For streams originating at Cloudfront append the following query string paramter to the URL so the filter will adjust accordingly: ?provider=acf

Playlists (v1.3)

Support for playlists has been added. Refer to the Playlist plugin docs.

Closed Captions (v1.4)

Support for closed captioning has been added. The filter can optionally load Flowplayer's Captions and Content Flash plugins (.swf) to display closed captioning in the media player window. Even though Flowplayer's Caption plugin can load an external file containing the caption information, the filter does not yet provide for this method. The caption information must be embedded into the media file, such as an MP4 subtitles track, or FLV cuepoints.

The filter has an additional site config to determine whether or not to load the Caption plugin by default. To override that default append the following query strting parameter to the URL: '?captions=1', or 'captions=0', to load or not load the Captions plugin, respectively. These query string parameters are detected in playlists, so you can be selective about which clips in a playlist display closed captions.

HLS from Wowza & FMS (v1.5)

Support for HTML5 video and audio has been added. Wowza's Streaming Engine and Adobe's Flash Media Server each support (after some configuration) Apple's HLS to allow delivery to iOS devices. The filter can detect whether the Flash plugin is present in the browser, and if configured to do so, will emit primitive HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags with source URLs corresponding to the Wowza/FMS HLS stream.

Where to Find

The plugin can be found in the Modules and plugins database here.

Source code

The source code repository is located at github.com in the appalachianstate/moodle-filter_rtmp repository.