You can turn off all cloud services. There are two cloud services of note:
- Video recording with Flash via one of our Red5 servers
- File conversion of HTML5 audio/video recordings via Amazon Web Services
Eliminating need for Red5 server
To remove the need to use a Red5 server, you can ...
- Simply don't record video. Its only needed for video.
OR - Don't record video with Flash, only use HTML5.
This is the best option, and it works well if you encourage desktop users to use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox
OR - Install your own Red5 server.
Not for the faint hearted and generally is a step into the past. Not recommended.
Eliminate need for file conversion with Amazon web services
Different devices and platforms mean that you need to consider several angles here.
For audio.
We have a Flash MP3 recorder, and that can record direct to MP3. But only if the device supports Flash.
For html5.
Different devices record to different formats. Conversion brings all those formats into universally playback'able MP4 (or MP3). You can avoid the need for any conversion at all, if all your recordings are made from one browser/device spec, eg Google Chrome on Windows 10. Since the device should be able to play back what it records. Most will not be fortunate enough to have this degree of control over what students record with though.
Install FFMPEG on your Moodle server
... and tell Poodll to use that. Then the conversions would happen all in house. This works pretty well, once you have it set up. But its not supported by us, because we can't support what we don't control, ie your server env. We do our best to help though.
When HTML5 and when Flash?
The final thing to note here is when you can use HTML5 recording, and when you need to use Flash.To use HTML5 recording, you need to satisfy these requirements:
- The URLs of the Moodle site pages with the HTML5 recorder must begin with "https"
- For audio, most modern browsers can record HTML5. Desktop Safari is a little problematic.
- For video, the browser must be Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and the device must not be running iOS
When HTML5 recording is not available Poodll defaults to using Flash. When Flash is not available it defaults to using the devices upload a file dialog, which may include the option to use the camera or mic on the device. There is also an app for iOS devices