Allow Tobira users to choose alternative video player

[oas777]

In case someone doesn't want Paella and its features. Users should be able to make this a default (in case Tobira is not used in learning scenarios where Paella is likely to be the default).

[LukasKalbertodt]

While I also would love to see a non-Paella player in Tobira, I actually don't think it's a good idea to have multiple players in Tobira (or at least in any given Tobira installation). From a UX perspective, it's just weird if users have to deal with two completely different players.

There is no technical reason why a player that supports dual stream videos, couldn't also be a perfectly nice and usable player for single-stream videos. So in my opinion we need to improve Paella to a point where everyone is happy with it for all videos, or we start developing an alternative. If "Tobira supporting multiple players" helps with that development of an alternative player, I'm all for it! I simply don't want Tobira installations to use different players for different videos.

In fact, now that I think about it, I quite like this approach: we start developing a new player (of course based on some existing technology) inside Tobira, but already written in way that allows us to easily extract it from this code base and publish it as standalone thing. Shipping it with Tobira (likely hidden as an experimental feature or behind a config option) is a great way to allow for easy testing.

[oas777]

I can see two players showing their respective advantages at https://tobira.opencast.org/lectures (with multiple sources, slide detection/preview, chapters) and https://tobira.opencast.org/campus (one source, simplified player) respectively, without users getting confused. Or an institution running two Tobiras for similar dual use cases separately.

As for your thoughts regarding Paella and/or a new player (I was actually more leaning towards an existing open source solution), we should probably discuss this after the DACH meeting (where Paella will be a topic not only in the context of LMS), I think.