What video formats are accepted in a knowledge base document?

[tony_carter]

I am trying to import an mp4 video into a Knowledge Base document, but it is telling me "Attachment is not a recognized video file format".

I have tried checking the documentation but can't find the answer.

Can someone please tell me what formats are accepted - or even better give me the link to the correct online document page.

thanks

Tony

[stb2]

Well, when I drag and Drop it in chrome (.avi) it simply "downloads" the video again. Hmm?! (the file appaears as a download in the bottom bar)

When I do it with an .mp4 file it starts to play.   Maybe when you install vlc browser plugin or divx player it will work.

The thing is this, I cant rollout a new plugin company wide just to watch videos. Thats not an option I think.

DO we have another choice? ( I might evaluate the youtube option but beside from that?)

[Dave Smith1]

Well, when I drag and Drop it in chrome (.avi) it simply "downloads" the video again. Hmm?! (the file appaears as a download in the bottom bar)

When I do it with an .mp4 file it starts to play. Maybe when you install vlc browser plugin or divx player it will work.

Yeah... that's the browser's behaviour.  

Essentially there will be a list of content-types (usually declared by the HTTP header from the web server, or file extension in the absence of any prior header) and this list directs the browser behaviour when that particular content is detected: do I play it, download it, display it, etc.

Unfortunately - as you've noticed - this list can vary according to browser, then additional browser plugin, and also external desktop applications (VLC/WMP) that try to be helpful to the browser.

Until fairly recently, the only cross-browser media format was flash, and even then some browsers refused to support it or threw security warnings.   HTML5 tried to standardise audio and video formats so that the browser manufacturers could play them natively, but there's still discrepencies between the type of codec used: the most common ones (MP4) aren't open-source, and completely free/unlicenced ones (OGG, MKV) aren't commonplace, so there's no one single format that crosses all browsers.   Google offered yet another format (.WEBM) but again not everything supports it.

The advantage of the YouTube approach is that any videos uploaded are then transcoded into different formats and a browser-dependent format (and bandwidth-dependent resolution) is selected by browser detection code.   This means compatibility issues are absorbed and addressed by YouTube, including player (mobile phones will autoswitch to their native playre rather than browser-based ones, for example), so it's offloading the problem to someone who's freely provided solutions.   The only issues you'll encounter here are:

• confidentiality - hosting it on Youtube means it'll be indexed and available for public consumption

• security - some organisations have network ACLs blocking access to YouTube

[tstocking]

I was looking at the same thing today and found this problem record. It doesn't look like it will be corrected:

https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0565108

[SC10]

Thanks for finding that Problem record, it for sure clears things up.

We ended up just uploading to an unlisted Youtube video, and using that as the video source.

[tstocking]

We wanted to go down that path but there was concern over former employees forwarding off the videos and users outside of our company being able to access them.

Looking at the OAuth avenue with YouTube but it doesn't look promising with a service account.