The TEL team generally recommend Google Chrome as the browser which provides the most satisfactory performance with Blackboard. During the last year, however, Google introduced changes which made it impossible to play certain types of media file in Chrome. In addition, there is a Known Issue in Blackboard which causes MP3 audio files to start playing automatically in Google Chrome, even when the auto-start option has been deselected.
The latest Blackboard release, now installed on our system, gets round these issues by enabling audio and video files to be embedded as HTML5 elements.
This change means that
- MP3 audio files uploaded to Blackboard can be played in any Internet Browser.
- MP4 video files uploaded to Blackboard can be played in any Internet Browser.
Our guide Uploading and embedding audio and video files into your Blackboard course provides details on how to use the new HTML5 Audio and HTML5 Video options to upload and embed media files, so that they can be played in any browser, on any device.
Please note
- The new functionality is available only for newly-created audio and video links in Blackboard. The guide suggests how you can deal with previously-uploaded media content to take advantage of the new functionality.
- Other file types (Ogg, WAV and WebM) are also supported by the HTML5 tools, but MP3 and MP4 are the only types playable in all of the main Internet Browsers.
- Windows Media files (wma and wmv) are not supported, and should be avoided when uploading media content to Blackboard.
- We also have guides to help you embed video content from sites such as YouTube into your Blackboard course: