We have been server problems since last week over at tokyo.poodll.com. If you have been having trouble video recording or audio recording you might have noticed the connection lamp on the recorder flashing red or yellow.
Basically we have outgrown the server’s capacity so we are setting up a new one. We are also taking the opportunity to do some upgrades and housekeeping. The new server should be up by Friday, probably sooner. You don’t need to do anything at your end to use the new server. I will post back here as soon as it is ready.
However when looking at the problem I noticed that a lot of people are recording audio via tokyo.poodll.com and converting the recordings to MP3. So I have a few suggestions to make about that.
PoodLL has two audio recorders. The original one (which has an MP3 checkbox) and the new one which records direct to MP3 without using tokyo.poodll.com.
The MP3 recorder is generally better because there is less that can go wrong. But recordings of more then 2 mins or so are quite hard work for the browser to process. So at that point you might consider the original recorder which uses Red5.
To improve but further complicate things, I have recently changed things around a little with the original (Red5) audio recorder. If FFMPEG is installed and set up correctly on the Moodle server, the MP3 conversion can be done there, ie not on
tokyo.poodll.com. This is much better because
b) it is a lot faster, so the chance of timeouts waiting for longer recordings to convert goes way down
Timeouts are particularly a problem with video recordings that are auto converted to MP4
To set the FFMPEG thing up
1) install FFMPEG on the moodle server with MP3 encoding built in. A command like this should work
ffmpeg -i afile.flv afile.mp3
2) check the “auto convert to MP3” in PoodLL filter settings
3) check “convert uploaded media with ffmpeg” in PoodLL filter settings
