Not everyone wants to use the Poodll players on their Moodle sites. There are reasons why this might be the case, including simply not wishing to make site wide changes to the user experience. Also improvements in Moodle 3.2 mean that there is now the option to use Video JS and other nice features like subtitles, in core Moodle.

But Poodll recording works better with Poodll players because:

  • With Poodll players the browser won’t cache the placeholder video or audio file (‘Poodll is converting your…’)
    If the browser caches the placeholder file, then refreshing the page will not update the video or audio.
  • Poodll player can auto-refresh via Ajax when the converted file is ready

However, lets say you really do need to use Moodle Multimedia plugins filter. In that case we can set it up so that at least the browser does not cache the placeholder file. Remember, this caching is a problem because no matter how often the user refreshes the page, they get the placeholder file long after converting has completed.

How do we do this? Well basically we append a unique parameter to the URL, before the Moodle Multimedia Plugins filter sees it. e.g

<a src="/path/to/video.mp4">video</a>

becomes

<a src="/path/to/video.mp4?cachekiller=4125145123455">video</a>

As long as the cache killer is unique on each page load, the browser will fetch the video afresh each time. The set up to prepare URLs like this is both simple and illustrates the flexibility of the Poodll player system.


Step 1

Ensure that Poodll is higher in the list of filters than the Multimedia Plugins (MMP) filter.
site admin  -> filters -> manage filters

Step 2

Create a “cachebuster” template in the Poodll filter templates section.
From a blank template page use the “Media file cache buster” preset.

Step 3

Choose to handle MP4 and MP3 files with Poodll, and set the handlers for those files to the Media File Cache Buster template we created in the previous step.


And thats it, now any mp3 or mp4 links will be modified with a cache busting parameter.
NB Your users will still need to refresh the page after recording. Because Moodle players do not auto refresh.