If you use Kaltura to embed videos in your Canvas courses, you may have noticed a change in the appearance of the video player for newly embedded videos. Kaltura video embeds created since August 5, 2024, use an updated “v7” player, which offers faster loading times and new features, including a searchable transcript panel, which improves accessibility and provides students with another way to engage with video content. This change did not upgrade previously embedded videos, so older video embeds still use the now-outdated “v2” player. Because vendor support is ending for the v2 player, we are encouraging UW-Green Bay instructors to replace old v2 player embeds while preparing future Canvas courses and providing resources in this post which will help you accomplish this task.
Why Upgrade?
It is important to upgrade your video embeds because Kaltura will no longer be providing support for the v2 player after December 30, 2024. While we expect v2 player embeds will continue to function for the foreseeable future, no support will be available for future v2 player issues, which could be caused by updates to Canvas or internet browsers. Upgrading embeds now will ensure that you will not need to do so in a panic if v2 player embeds unexpectedly break in the future. Upgrading will also allow students to take advantage of the new search and transcript features added to the v7 player. More information on this player transition is available in this Universities of Wisconsin KnowledgeBase article.
How to tell if your video uses the v2 player?
To help instructors identify video embeds that use the outdated v2 player, a small warning indicator is now visible in the upper left corner of the v2 player during the first ten seconds of playback. This warning indicator first appeared on December 2, 2024, and is a sure sign that the video embed uses the old player. The v2 and v7 players are also visibly distinct in other ways. Before playing a video, the only control visible on the v7 player is a circle-shaped play button in the middle of the player. The outdated v2 player shows additional controls at the bottom of the player before playback, and the play button in the middle of the v2 player is rectangular. More tips for distinguishing between the video players are available in this IT KnowledgeBase article.
How to upgrade players?
Upgrading a single video embed is easy: edit the Canvas page, delete the existing video embed, and then use the My Media tool to create a new embed of the video from your My Media library. You can find more information on manually replacing video embeds in this guide.
Perhaps you use enough videos in your Canvas courses that the thought of finding and manually replacing all those embeds feels overwhelming. If this is the case, we’ve developed a procedure to upgrade all video embeds in a course at once! This procedure uses the Search tool in Canvas to find all v2 player embeds in a Canvas course and replace them with v7 player embeds automatically. By following this procedure, you may be able to upgrade all of the Kaltura video players in a course in as little as five minutes. We recommend first watching the video below to learn how.
The full set of instructions for using this procedure are available on this guide page. For most courses, running this process one time using the find and replace codes provided in the instructions for replacing “Standard Player LTI Embeds” will update all of the video players in the course. We recommend that instructors who want a quick way to update their players try this once to see if it works. Chances are that it will work, but if it doesn’t, you won’t break anything in your course—the search tool just won’t find any matching players. Rest assured, in the very unlikely scenario that something does go terribly wrong with your find and replace attempt, there is an “undo” button for reverting all changes.
When this find and replace doesn’t work on the first try, the process gets trickier. The find and replace codes for “Standard Player LTI Embeds” won’t find any matching players if you selected alternate players (like the “Download/Share/Embed” and “Simplified” players) in the advanced options menu while embedding or if you embedded by copying iframe embed codes from My Media instead of using the button in the Rich Content Editor. The challenge in these cases is remembering which player(s) you used and determining which alternative find and replace codes from the guide will work to upgrade those embeds. The find and replace codes used in this procedure each target a single, specific embed type. If you mixed and matched the players and methods you used to embed videos in a course, you may have to perform multiple find and replace operations in the same course to upgrade all of the videos.
Need Help?
In those tricky cases, please do not hesitate to reach out to CATL for assistance. CATL staff have the knowledge and experience needed for identifying the player types and embed methods used in a course, and we are happy to provide guidance when the standard find and replace codes do not work in a course. If you have tried the procedure with the standard codes, didn’t have success, and are unsure of what to try next, please fill out this survey to request assistance from CATL. Please only submit courses you are preparing for an upcoming term or sandbox courses that you regularly use and update; CATL staff will not have the capacity to work on concluded courses or honor requests to update “all my courses.”
