Watched Folders, Videos & Posters
The local videos are read by agileVideos via the so called "Watched Folders". This means you place the files in a folder on your website and then select this folder in the module settings as a watched folder. Each module instance can monitor an unlimited number of watched folders. If new videos are added / removed via Mediamanager or FTP, the module adapts agilely and will show the new files on the next load of the page as well or the deleted ones no longer.
Same file different formats
You can put different file types for playback in the corresponding folders. agileVideos will always look for an mp4 file first, only if for a corresponding file name only other file types like ogv or webm are available they will be preferred. So if you put the following files in a watched folder:
- my-video.mp4
- my-video.webm
- my-video.ogv
So agileVideos will display ONE video with the title "my-video" in the frontend and this will point to the mp4 file.
Define video poster
mp4 files are nowadays supported by actually all browsers (can i use) without any problems, besides this advantage the browser can also provide a video poster from the respective first frame of the video. But often this is just a black or useless image. Therefore you can also define your own covers that the module uses in the grid or slider overview. To define your own cover / poster for a video, simply place a jpg or png file in the same folder where the corresponding video is located. In our example from before it would look like this:
- My-Video-Folder
- my-video.mp4
- my-video.webm
- my-video.ogv
- my-video.jpg
- second-vid.mp4
- second-vid.jpg
- images
- media
- ...
Recursive / Subfolder Support
When you define a new watched folder you have an option to include subfolders. This option is helpful if you want to use all video files of all subfolders of this folder as well, of course - if you overdo it this can have a negative effect on the loading time of your website. But let's assume that our folder structure looks like this:
- My-Holidays
- Seaworld
- video-a.mp4
- video-b.mp4
- ...
- Disneyland
- mickey.mp4
- donald.mp4
- pluto.mp4
- ...
- Hawaii
- first-evening.mp4
- poolbar.mp4
- the-hotel-tour.mp4
- ....
- ...
- Seaworld
- ...
We could now simply add the folders Seaworld, Disneyland and Hawaii as single Watched Folders aka Sources. That wouldn't be wrong (we will later) - but if we want to show all videos inside a slider/grid anyway, we can easily do that by making the folder "My Holidays" our Watched Folder and enabling the option to include the subfolders as well (Recursive).