SharePoint 2013 Collaborating with Videos

Intranet video portals for the enterprise are gaining popularity because they are effective for sharing information across the entire organization. SharePoint 2013 does a great job supporting video communications-from sharing a video across a team site to building a knowledge management/video portal for the enterprise.In SharePoint 2013, videos are treated as a content type as opposed to just a file, which provides a more complete experience for creating, uploading, finding, sharing, and viewing videos.

Organizing Videos

In SharePoint 2013, videos are organized in a manner similar to document sets, which is a group of related documents that can be created in a single step and managed as one entity. SharePoint creates a stub (think of it as a folder) to hold a video and all the related contents, such as user-defined properties, thumbnails, video renditions, and other documents related to the video. When you upload a video file, SharePoint automatically creates this stub for that video. You can imagine the video set to be the encapsulation of everything related to that video.

New Video Player Page

SharePoint 2013 offers a video player page for each video, which surfaces the video with its metadata and all the properties the user fills in. These include name, description, owner, the people in video, and keywords-to name a few. Videos can be played from the video player page.

The video player page offers the ability to add related items. Imagine you upload a video of a presentation, but you also want to add the PowerPoint deck used in that presentation for your viewers. In SharePoint 2013, it's right alongside! Simply drag and drop the relevant files that you feel the viewers of this video should see. Everything is in a single page!

Media Players

SharePoint 2013 has a built-in HTML5 media player that is used to play all video files that are compatible with the HTML5 <video> implementation for the current browser. This means you can now play videos on mobile devices such as iOS that don't support Silverlight. If the format is not playable by the HTML5 player, then we use Silverlight. The video is auto-played when the user opens the video player page. The player streams video content using the BLOB cache, progressive streaming, and bit-rate throttling in the same manner as the SharePoint 2010 media player.

Video Player Page

Uploading Videos

Videos can be uploaded to any library, but you can get the most out of SharePoint if you upload videos to a library that has the video content type enabled. For example, the Asset Library, which is customized for storing digital assets. You can enable the video content type in other libraries by adding video from the existing site content types in the library settings.

Videos can be uploaded to SharePoint or surfaced via SharePoint. To surface videos from external sources on a SharePoint site, you can upload by selecting the 'Files' tab on the ribbon, in the new group, choosing a video from the new document drop-down menu gives you three options:  

• Upload video from my computer: Use this option to upload videos from your computer using Windows Explorer.

• Provide a link to a video: Use this option to provide a link to a video file that resides in another site (such as videos from other SharePoint sites or file shares). It is important to note that your URL should point to a video stream file and not to a video player URL.

• Provide code to embed a video from the web: Use this option to paste the embed code for your video from anywhere on the web (for example, YouTube). So, if your organization has a channel on YouTube with a collection of videos, you can now keep track and view those videos on your internal SharePoint site. Although the video file is not physically stored in SharePoint, SharePoint knows how to treat each of these files and ensures you get the relevant features regardless of the way you create them.

Video Edit Form

Video Thumb-nailing

There are two types of thumbnails for videos, Server-generated and user-selected. In server-generated thumb-nailing, all that you have to do is upload your videos to a library with the video content type enabled, and SharePoint automatically generates thumbnails for your videos without you having to do anything else.

Use the client-side thumbnail generator to set those perfect moments as thumbnails for your videos, in case the server-generated thumbnail is not the one you want to use. The thumbnail generator can be accessed from the video edit form. When you choose the change thumbnail link, you get an option to capture thumbnail from video, use a picture from my computer, or use a picture from a web address.

Video Metadata

Video tagging, rating, and view count features take you a step closer in personalizing your video experience. You can now tag people in videos to help viewers know the people in that video. Enabling ratings from the library settings lets viewers rate your videos. This is especially useful when you want to have a way for your users to view the most rated or most popular videos in your portal. 

Reference: Official Microsoft SharePoint Blog