Kaltura updates
What's new
05/11/2021: Interactive Video Paths
Interactive Video Paths is a now available in all Canvas courses which have My Media, or can also be used at video.vu.nl . To learn more about this new tool, see Interactive Video Paths (EN) or Interactive Video Paths (NL)
08/07/2021: Kaltura REACH : ordering captions for videos
What is Kaltura REACH?
It is now possible to use the Kaltura REACH service which provides machine-based captions (subtitles) for your video based on automated speech recognition (ASR).
Kaltura REACH captions are usually around 70-80% accurate and can improve over time with every video it processes, learning to recognize spoken words, adapting to accents, background noise, volume changes and voices.
Accuracy of the machine-captions may vary depending on e.g. audio quality, clarity of speech, background noise and specialized terminology. For this reason, Kaltura REACH also provides a Caption Editor which can be used to revise and improve the accuracy of the video captions.
Please note that this service provides captions and transcriptions, but not translations.
How to create captions?
1. Select My Media from your Canvas course menu or select My Media once logged in at video.vu.nl
2. Click on the video for which you want to create captions.
3. Below the Actions menu, choose "Captions & Enrich".
4. Choose the language (English or Dutch) as it is spoken in the video.
5. Click Submit.
6. Below Existing Requests you will find the status of the request: this will initially be Pending, and later change to Processing.
7. Once the status is set to Completed, the captions for this video will be available and can be played by using the CC (Closed Captions) button which can be found in the playbar below the video.
Overview: creating captions
Please note: to view Captions select the ‘Closed Caption’ (cc) button on the bottom right of the video:
CC button:
How to edit captions?
In the editor you can make textual changes to the captions or adjust time settings.
Click on "the pencil" to open the Closed Captions Editor (in Actions> Capture & Enrich).
Use the play button below the video on the right, to view the captions. These will turn blue when played.
On the left you can adjust the text.
You can use the arrows below the video to jump back 5 seconds, and jump 5 seconds further.
Using the search box at the top, you can find specific words in the captions, replace them, or add a speaker.
Save your edited captions as soon as you're done using the Save button
Use Revert only if you want to delete all editing and want to start over again.
Please note that editing captions can take quite some time particularly when editing Dutch captions. So take this into account when planning to add captions to your video.
06/10/2020: Schedule video publish time
You can now use scheduled publishing to schedule a video to become visible to your students at a specific time.
How do I add a publishing schedule?
1. Click on the video you want to schedule in My Media
2. Click on the Actions button, and choose Edit
3. On the Details tab, choose the option Specific Time Frame radio button. (By default content is always available.)
4. Choose a start time (date and hour) and choose an end time (date and hour). The default is "no end time".
5. Make sure when you choose a time zone, you select UTC +2:00 Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern etc.
6. Click Save
Subsequently, you can publish the video to the Media Gallery (or to a channel when working in video.vu.nl) Here, your video will only be visible to you or other users, only between the scheduling start time and end time.
You can use the following filters in My Media to find your scheduled videos using the filters All availabilities, Future Scheduling, Past Scheduling.
How does it work?
A scheduled video can be published but won't appear in the Media Gallery (or your Channel at video.vu.nl until the scheduling window will start.)
A scheduled video can be added to a playlist but won't appear in the playlist until the scheduling window will start.
A scheduled video can be set as unlisted in video.vu.nl and shared but won't be able to be seen by anyone but the owner, until the scheduling window will start.
The owner of the video can always find and view the video in My Media.
Specific time frame:
24/09/2020 Playback rate selector added to all players
All videoplayers used in the Kaltura- Canvas integration and in video.vu.nl have been updated with the following features:
You do now have the additional functionality to select playback speed in all videoplayers.
A new skin for mobile devices has been activated.
Multiple stream videos now start by default with the screen recording (i.e.powerpoints slides) in large view and webcamrecording in small view.
01/09/2020 Zoom recordings in Kaltura
Zoom recordings are now automatically uploaded to Kaltura. when you choose for ‘record in the cloud’. A copy of the recording is automatically sent to My Media which is a personal video gallery. See also, Record a meeting in zoom and upload it to Kaltura. You can publish these videos to the Media Gallery of your Canvas course or in other Canvas course items, such as Pages. For more info, see Kaltura in Canvas (EN) / Kaltura via Canvas (NL)
Known issues
I am getting an error in Canvas about 3rd party cookies, what can I do?
In some cases, you cannot view videos in Canvas because your browser is blocking 3rd party session cookies, please follow these instructions (EN) / instructies (NL)
25/11/2020: Issues below have been resolved yesterday evening.
24/11/2020: Kaltura is currently experiencing several issues. Both video.vu.nl and the Kaltura-Canvas integration are incidentally giving errors. Kaltura is investigating, also see Kaltura's status page .
06/10/2020: Due to a migration of Cloud Service Provider, Kaltura experienced several issues from the beginning of September until the beginning of October. Recently, performance levels of the Kaltura platform have returned to normal. For a list of issues relevant to VU university that were reported, investigated and resolved, please see Previous Issues below. For an up- to-date overview of the current status of the Kaltura platform, see Kaltura's status page .
30/09/2020 Update:
Earlier today a service outage occurred between 08:25 and 08:40 due to a database issue for which an emergency service maintenance had to be done on the Kaltura database which also resulted in a 15-minute service interruption. The issue was resolved at 13:45. Kaltura is monitoring, see for more info Kaltura's status page .
23/09/2020 Update:
Earlier today users may have seen API errors or slowness with Kaltura within Canvas or at video.vu.nl. Some application features were unavailable or returned errors. Kaltura resolved the issue and is monitoring, please refer to Kaltura's status page .
Overall performance, with regard to recently uploaded videos, should be back to normal after implementing multiple fixes.
Overall performance of uploading videos should be back to normal.
17/09/2020 API Errors:
Both video.vu.nl and the Kaltura-Canvas integration are incidentally giving API errors. Kaltura is investigating, please refer to Kaltura's status page .
16/09/2020 Playback issues:
Users may experience buffering or slow playback with some videos, specifically videos which were uploaded close to the time of the attempted playback.
09/09/2020 Upload delays:
Issues related to uploading video content to Kaltura, are continuing to occur intermittently.
Media is taking longer to process and become available. Processing times may differ from time to time. If you encounter delays uploading a video, please try again after 20 minutes.
Upload failures have been occurring earlier this week resulting in error messages like Oops! Upload failed or Oops! Uploaded bytes exceed file size. Kaltura has implemented a fix and is monitoring.
Some videos uploaded on the 3rd of September may have playback issues (e.g. spinning wheel or dark screen). Kaltura is working on re-converting videos that are stuck in transcoding or show an error state.
See Kaltura's status page for the latest updates on these issues.