video in epub
 

Ok, I have a novel I wrote and I have mp4 videos I would like to play at various places in the novel. Can I use sigil to insert the videos? If so how would I do that? Thanks so much in advance.

<p> ... </p>

<div class=”videoContainer”>
<video src=”video H264-640x480.m4v” poster=”images/posterframe.png” controls=”controls”>
</video>

<p> ... </p>

##

The video goes in the Misc folder. - Fabe

and it won't be a valid ePUB.

What would make it a valid epub?

You'd probably have to use an <object> tag to embed the video, and provide a fallback item for it (something to render instead of the video, for systems that don't support the specific file type you use, which will be almost all for the moment). I have never used it, so I can't say for sure, but you can read the spec.

I wonder if having a link to a webpage with the video on it would be possible?
thanks,

It will in Apple's iBookstore.

It would be possible. Whether that works as one may expect or not, that's a different matter.

First, if the device has no network connectivity, it will obviously be a non-working link. Even for devices with connectivity, it would depend on how the reading software communicates with the internet browsing software (if any), and on any plugins or video support available.

In any case, providing the URL in text (hyperlinked or not) would always allow any user to copy it in a computer and view the video, if interested.

It might be accepted, but it won't conform to the ePUB specification, which doesn't list "<video>" as an accepted tag.

AND, based on experience (a LOT), I can tell you that when you try to upload it to Apple, as an itunespublisher, it fails. They send it back, even though they KNOW it's an enhanced ePUB, because of course they have a special channel for that, so THEN it has an itunesmetadataplist file jammed in the zip, so THEN you have to yank that OUT and send it back again. It's a circus.

And, no, it never passes ePUBcheck, and, FWIW, Sigil rips out the video tags.

Hitch

video is in Misc folder, but Misc folder is not located, why??
Can I make a e-pub with video by sigil?
I've been in trouble with video with sigl...
Please help me out :help:

I see 2 errors that need to be fixed to read (Red).
Sigil folder names Start with a Uppercase Letter
If the video is in Misc, the the src= must include that piece of information :)

You cannot add video with Sigil out of the box, since video is not supported in the ePUB specs. Only Apple in their crippled adaption of ePUB supports it.

This makes sense to me (Thank you), but can't run the video still...
If the Sigil can't contains the video, is there any other epub software can
contains the video?

Galapagos, the ebook reader device made by SHARP showed
a few ebooks which contains video, like Apple sampler.
These are not epub, but XMDF format. (which is very local system)

Just because you can't See(watch) the Video in Sigil, does not mean that you can't create the document? (still cringing: Video in books :eek:)

Ducky:

You can't create the document, really; we do it by using placeholder tags, then ripping open the html and substituting the video or audio tags. Sigil strips 'em, because they're not part of the Spec. Can't be done in Sigil alone.

HTH,
Hitch

If Sigil can't do it alone, what else do we need?

Can't be done in Sigil alone, so, we need to do it by using placeholder tags, then ripping open the html and substituting the video or audio tags.

Is this what we need to do?
sorry if my question was pointless.
:smack::smack::smack:

I think what Hitch is saying: Put a Picture of the screen shape size your
video will occupy (aplacemat.jpg. could even be a screen shot of the title),and note the filename that contains it.

AFTER your EPUB has passed Flightcrew and been FINAL saved.
Unpack the Epub and replace the place holder code, image in the file you noted, and re-pack the EPUB.

Maybe we can get John to loosen up the Pure EPUB spec enforcement, and allow 'Non-Spec items' to be included after answering a few Nag boxes ("I authorize non-compliant inclusion") ;)
Flightcrew only Yellow Flags extra files :smack:, so why not treat a Video as 'extra'?

Instead of just non-compliant perhaps ePub Version 3 would be appropriate as a marker, which would now do the same thing but would set a direction for the future. ePub 3 is coming. I have started to make some sense of it in the wiki but it is only preliminary. I would seem things are headed for more complications.

For clarity:

What I meant was, we use some type of html tag that passes, i.e., an href, and put in text that we can easily search for, like "VIDEO HERE, IDIOT!" (Yes, my crews send me those type of love-notes.) When the epub has passed epubcheck, we:

1. Crack open the epub;
2. Open the relevant xhtml file that contains the video, OR,
3. Open the relevant xhtml file(s) that contain the audio clips,
4. In whatever html editor blows your skirt up--I'm a NoteTab Pro gal, meself, and
5. Replace the href code with the proper audio/video html5 tags as per Apple's specs, then,
6. We save the altered xhtml files, and,
7. Rezip the epub, using something simple like epubpack.

That's it. We usually wrap the href around an image that's the poster image. That's what I really meant by "placeholder," was some code you can easily find and then replace in an html editor, because despite Sigil's wonderfulness, you can't get there from here.

Also, n.b.--please, everyone note that Apple's latest-and-greatest guidelines, in which they now want Guide items, seems to utterly bollix up any kind of normal paging in Nook. Just FYI. Yanking out hair today; may now have to make epubs ONLY for Apple and epubs for everyone else. What a load of old....

(Ooops, n.b.#2: If you're brave, try Bookbin, particularly if you're only (no offense) doing your own book, for multi-media, but beware the Beta-wocky. What the heck.)

And, really, what freaking genius decides to go to war with AMAZON? The second-largest corporation in the WORLD, behind Exxon? Wankers.

Frustrated with Apple,
Hitch

Well Apple has almost always warred with the big guys, initially Microsoft. At least since the 80s. Although I do believe they went overboard here. Who would fight Amazon? How about California? They are fighting with Amazon over tax collection. Does Apple collect taxes from iTunes?

Dale

It's gonna take long time to understand for me.
I wish Apple will publish more easy guide for video & audio in epub.
epub with the video is very attractive, but very frustrating...

Actually, it's not very attractive. I prefer the words. If an author cannot get his/her point across with just words and needs video to help, then said author is not all that good.

They only kind of books for which I can imagine audio or video are instruction or training manuals and then not even all kinds.

However, those kind of manuals also can have other specifics which can be hard to do with ePUB.

I really think it is a bad decisions to go for audio/video/javascript support in ePUB v3 instead of solving more book related issues like better formatting, correct handling of footnotes, perhaps headers and footers and things like that.
That's what happens when company's with big money are messing with open standards to get their crap in.

I would agree that there are many pressing matters to fix in the actual eBook experience but video is just an artifact of going to HTML5 and cannot be blamed on ePub. I do think that Apple is tipping the scale a bit heavy on one side.

Read this and weep.

Unfortunately, people are convinced that the money lies in developing ever flashier shinies in order to beguile the customers, rather than in fixing fundamental problems or ensuring true cross-platform compatibility. Anyone who believes that ePub 2 address all the problems with creating static text should try creating an ePub that displays everything locked to a baseline grid (a pretty basic approach in typography for a very long time).

ePub 3 contains a lot of things that might make it easier to produce good-looking books that are easy to navigate. But it fails to be prescriptive enough to ensure that these documents work in much the same way across all ePub 3 devices. We already have the problem with people having to tweak ePubs differently for the iPad opposed to ADE, and these differences sometimes go very deep.

The primary job of a standard is to be a standard and the spec uses the word 'should' all too often - which means, 'this is the way we'd like things to happen, but you can ignore it as long as you can think up an excuse'. For instance, the handling of oeb-page-head/foot has had the language "Neither should be simply presented as if it were inline or block." for years, and it's exactly the same in ePub 3, yet ADE 1.8 still presents these elements as blocks in the same flow as the rest of the text. And they can get away with it, because that's what the standard allows.

I don't want cutesy things in my eBooks. I just want to read. Keep your multimedia out of my books.

ARRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!
 

Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That's the ever-inceasing problem that we run into as commercial ebook producers. I get requests for the fixed-format layout constantly, and I feel bad because I have to charge an arm and a leg--and I'm not that crazy about it, firstly, and secondly, the marketplace for it (on iBooks) is pretty damned narrow bandwidth.

The ADE-iBooks schism is increasingly a problem; as is the ever-growing divergence from "basic" ADE by usage...as an example, Nook's "new" hyphenation issues now cause books that were perfectly fine a year ago to hyphenate absurdly, because they're not wrapped in specific CSS to prevent it. I had a book rejected by frakking Lulu today because "Your ebook has been rejected for missing, incomplete, unreadable, or inaccurate Table of Contents. The NCX must be accurate."

Now, the bloody NCX is accurate, the book validates in every validator on the planet, there's naught missing, incomplete, unreadable or inaccurate. That's their entire error message. So, purely passing epubcheck is now an imaginary goalpost, as it is with Apple. And, like Apple, the "error," however imaginary, is suitably vague so that, no matter what the issue is, you can't find it to fix it, and it has NAFT to do with epub2 or 3. /rant

The essential problem is, as always, money. It's not as though anyone with any authority is standing up and saying that this can't/won't be done; Apple gets what Apple wants; Nook gets what Nook wants, Amazon gets Mobi/prc, and those of us making the actual frakking books are stuck in the middle, wading in increasingly-deep offal, beset by clients who, like crows, want the latest shiny pretty thing. /sorry, mo' rant.

I don't think that there's any solution...because nobody but the folks in the trenches think there's a problem. If ThreePress is making a "magic book" with ePUB3 interactivity, well, bygod, we'll all be stuck with it shortly. We still won't be able to make a freaking dropcap that works in both iBooks and Nook...but bygod, we'll make ships sail across the device. In the meantime, any possibility of using XML as a carrier to make life easier will sail right out the window...

Sorry...you know what? I took one look at that article and my head exploded. I shouldn't be raving. Long day, too much caffeine, too little sleep. Leaving now.

Hitch

we saw it coming didn't we?
 

:smack: OH YES thats what we really need in books :bigcry::swear:
*sigh*

Mom or Dad is supposed to supply the Audio Visual effects while reading a book to smalls.

Agree, that's the fun part to reading to my children. Supply the funny voices, sound and movement effects and so on.

However, I do see a market for it when we look at childrens books. I also know that this was a 'logical' movement. Could they only please do the following things *as well*
1. provide stronger wording in the format description instead of 'should' and alike
2. fix the formatting issues we have now (should be solved by point 1...)
3. Bloody agree on the specifications and stick by it.

When not possible, please make it a derivative/fork of the specifications and call it different.

It the near future we are almost obliged to create at lease the following formats:
1. ePUB (ADE)
2. ePUB (Nook)
3. ePUB (iBooks)
4. mobi

And I wouldn't be surprised that if/when Amazon/Kindle supports ePUB in the future that there would be an additional on. Probably they will have their own flavour...

That's one.
Also many how-to books can improve their qualities with audio & visual effects.

video in ePub documents
 

A lot of commentators have expressed horror at the thought of having video elements in ePub dcuments. "Keep video out of my books!" they say. As a postgraduate medical educator I have a great need to produce in-house text teaching materials that can be carried in a 7 inch eReader "off WiFi line" and that includes integrated video clips. Sure, keep your old Kindle next to your bed for night reading of novels (without video). I love my old beside Kindle too.
The color eReader with video is the FUTURE EDUCATIONAL BOOK of educators. The wonderful thing will be one can edit the base documents on your office computer and just pull in the class eReaders to upload the updated material every few months.
At the moments my illustrated PDFs read great on the color eReaders, but I need to figure out how to get my accompanying video clips integrated into the documents in some format or some way.

I think ereader are computing-power-sided still to weak for that
I remember a discussion with sb searching for a linux capable laptop for studying purposes (organic chemistry) he explicitely needed 3d graphic support - (so chose nvidia) for display and analysis of chemical structures.

I am not so much worried they add JavaScript and videos to ePubs. What I am worried is that my download time will be longer. With 3G or WiFi ereaders, it does have huge difference whether size is 500kB or +100MB.
JavaScript support could be useful for navigating or for notes. It could be useful for school books or similar self-teaching books. JavaScript can have other possibilities, too. But not on standard eInk device which started the whole ebook frenzy. Will current eInk devices support ePub3 through firmware updates, I guess not.
I have take closer look on what ePub3 has to offer, other than bells and whistles. Inserting video seems to be easy at least. Standard HTML5.

To the OP,
http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/.

She has a few books about formatting epub's for Apple Devices, and a little mini booklet about audio and video in epub.

I'd be really astonished IF you find something. (and bet I won't be the only one) Instead of focusing development on well-known troubles on the text-based content side (look in the epub-forum what all requires tweaks to look somehow reasonable and halfway Clean according to typeseting standards) They scraped all bells&whistles together they could find, glued 'em to the format and sprayed "epub3" on the outcome.

Y'know, the sad part is, it doesn't matter. It does not matter one whit what we think, say or do. I have to slog through this crap every day; authors who want every Magpie thing in the whole world in their books, but can't even manage to send me the basic information I need (metadata) for embedding to meet the minimum ePUB standards, so I have to scrounge for it from copyright pages, etc. I've lost track of the number of books that Apple's sent back for the most ludicrous things (not simply to us, mind you); I've had clients who have come to me (for ePUB clean-up of someone else's books) because their books were accepted at Apple but rejected at Overdrive for mystery reasons.

If there's a retailer out there actually using ePUBcheck as something other than an excuse, I'm damned if I know which one it is. Every single day, it's "embed audio" (of some non-professional person reading an excerpt from the work in which it's being embedded--I mean, think about that; not an excerpt from a DIFFERENT or future book--it's the book someone has already bought) or "embed video" (of homemade videos) or "make the ship sail across the sea" (gee, thanks, Threepress), or...oh, my new favorite, make a robot-voice MP3 that magically sounds like Robin Sachs, or...the retailers do NOT care, and the ammy authors only want whatever is going to make them the next John Locke (put the Other books page at the front! Put it at the back! Put it in the middle of the book with a Pink Teddy Bear gift certificate!)...I mean, it's endless.

If I had a wishlist, it would be ONE damn standard that we could all use and, more importantly, rely upon. Do I care if it's html5 and css3? Or ePUB3? No. I just wish it wasn't 20 different moving goalposts for 20 different retailers, particularly when (for those of us making books commercially) most authors won't sell any books on 17 or 18 of those platforms. And it's not just Apple I'm bitching about; Nook is just as bad, and I shudder to think about what will show up in its new incarnation.

Not to mention what happens when they do change something, and suddenly 100 ebooks abruptly look like hell (like the infamous Nook hyphenation issue). It's hard enough trying to explain the very basics ("there are no pages," and "you can't use a sidebar in a K1-K2- or K-3") without trying to explain why everything is different from platform to platform, and how it's not realistic to expect any ebook company to make 5 versions of one book as 5 different ePUBs just to satisfy Nook's RMSDK versus Apple's idiotic centering issue versus Sony's equally idiotic Pre-900 series justification issues...ARRRGGGGHHHHH!

I seriously wish that, glitzy as it is, Apple would have kept ebooks and apps SEPARATE, and kept ebooks as text-delivery devices and apps as whiz-bang "ooooh-aahhhh" mini-website delivery devices. But that ship has sailed (no Threepress pun intended), and those of us in the Biz or dedicated dilettanti are stuck with it.

Sorry...just blowing off some steam. Bad day at Black Rock here at Booknook, where apparently rude clients were the Troop du Jour.

</rant>

Hitch

Thanks for adding this!

You're most welcome. And welcome to the fold!

Hitch