[ARCHIVED] Media Recorder in Rich Content Editor

[S9300807]

Some of our teachers experience pixelation when using the Rich Content Editor Media Recorder.  The videos are pixelated and the sound is poor quality.  The same teacher can record a video ion the same laptop in Windows Movie Maker or iMovie and the video quality is fine and the sound is good.  It doesn't seem to be related to our District network issues as it happens to these same teachers at home or at school.  Not everyone experiences this. Have any of you had this issue??  Thoughts, Ideas?  Thanks!

[kmeeusen]

We have experienced several issues around the built-in media recorder:

• Slow-loading,
• Failure to load at all in some browsers and the ineffective browser changing from time-to-time, and
• Poor image and sound quality.

I actually use the media recorder (or rather make my students use it) as an assignment submission type for a particular assignment type in my courses, and had to change things to allow my students to upload media files from their phones and other devices because of the very poor performance of this feature.

I have no solutions, just support of your own observations.

[DaleDrees]

I have experienced some other issue with the built-in media recorder (audio only) in Firefox. If I plug an external microphone such as the Chat-50 and then use the built-in recorder and select "Record with Microphone Only" and then right click in the black box area and select Settings and choose the Chat 50 (over my internal microphone in my laptop) it acts like it is selected but when  you record and playback it is still defaulted to the internal microphone (sound quality on my internal is really bad).

If I do this same procedure in Chrome then everything works the way it is supposed to (it records using the Chat 50).

I found this out because I use the microphone for feedback in the Speedgrader and one of the students sent me an email and said the audio was horrible. Now I just use Chrome and it works great but I don't know if anyone else has run into this (could be just my computer but.)

[kmeeusen]

I know Dale. This inconsistent response across various supported browsers is frustrating. It is also frustrating to have to tell my faculty, "If it doesn't work in browser X, switch to browser Y." This is not an answer they want to hear.

[awilliams]

I think the media recorder in the RCE suffers from being the "lowest common denominator" solution. I imagine it's difficult to create a piece of software that runs in a browser on all platforms and creates decent audio/video results. In general I consider the native media recorder a good option for student submissions, quick audio recordings, or when nothing else is available but never recommend that our faculty use it to create video if they are concerned with high quality.

[scaroj]

I am having the same problem with Chromebooks which therefore, means I am in Chrome but I rarely get a decent sound quality.  This is very frustrating because there are so many times we would like to submit this way. Our music department was excited to have students submit sound bites for formative checks and this is quite impossible using the internal tools.  It adds many steps because then screencastify becomes students' next tool of choice and that type of file is not supported by Canvas. Teachers have to either listen outside of Speedgrader or have the students upload to Youtube and then submit...many more steps.

[aspall]

I've had some luck improving the sound quality of recordings by adjusting the input levels through the system settings of the device being used. Often, it's set too high, but the web-based recorder can't make adjustments on the fly, so the sound crackles in the recording at those spots when it's topping out.

[scaroj]

Do you know if that is an Admin feature in Chromebooks or should I be able to do this on individual devices.  I looked in settings but am not finding any way to adjust them on the individual device?  Thank you for your help!!

[aspall]

I'm afraid that I don't have any experience with ChromeOS; I've only worked with macOS and Windows machines. I've just done some investigating, however, and it looks like you can adjust input volume via the Flash plugin, by right-clicking the recording window and selecting "Settings" from the context menu.

[mcowen]

I used to see something very similar quite often in a district where I did tech support. The issue was the 'hardware acceleration' setting in flash.  Check out this doc: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/poor-video-quality-flash-player.html

Specifically the part below the table stating "To disable hardware acceleration, do the following:"

[noates]

We are finding the poor quality in the video as well.  Thank you for the suggestion to record out of Canvas and then upload the file into Canvas.  I'll have our teacher try that.  If there is a solution, I would love to hear it.

Thanks

Nancy Oates

[thebert]

Christ is in our midst!

Recording in Canvas has been an education issue with us. We have to get passed the general ignorance of video recording first. I record in Canvas with few problems, but I record generally on my MacAir with Screenflow. I upload to announcements or to a specific question one might have in an e-mail. Usually I want the recording to be "professional" not spontaneous.

I find too a general ignorance about computing, e.g. closing applications when not in use or shutting down one's machine weekly or clearing one's browser cache. I am continually amazed that closing apps or shutting down a machine or clearing one's browser cache answers many questions about video.

Try it; it won't hurt.

🙂

[scaroj]

My issue with recording in Canvas is with Student submissions because they

have Chrome books and they do not work well with Adobe Flasch

[QC99_tsilvius]

We're having some struggles with the Rich Content Editor video recorder (as well as the video recorder for Assignment submissions) working correctly on Chromebooks. When a user begins to record a video the Chromebook video cam turns on and the image is seen on the screen in the tool preview, but instead of displaying a record red dot, the overlay on the video preview reads to "try again later" and will simply not provide a way to click record.

I know this isn't exactly the same concern as the original post, but I felt it was a bit related to ask this group. Incidentally, the video recording feature works fine with Mac and Win on the same network, but we can't seem to figure out what's holding this up for Chromebooks. Thanks in advance if someone knows about a guide somewhere that might address this.

[Robbie_Grant]

S9300807,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[noates]

Thank you for reaching out to us but I think we are ok now. Happy Holidays!

Nancy Oates, IT

[S9300807]

The issue was with a Chrome setting that had to be changed with a Chrome update.