Tech Forum

I am frequently getting questions about downloading content from the church sites for classes or other instruction. Our building have 1.5 megabit internet connections and to have multiple multimedia connections in addition to other internet traffic is not reliable. Our FM recently sent out information encouraging our members to download the content before hand. I am finding that may in our stake are getting frusterated as they cant find a way to download the content. For example, mormonsandgays.org has an embeded flash video called Ty's Story and our Stake President wants to show it to the bishops and play it without concern with internet issues. How can I download this video for offline use?

Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately that video is not a downloadable video.

Best bet is to que the video ahead of time and let it fully load, then back up the slider (on the player) that way it should work fine.

This illustrates the problem of pushing a suggested work-around that doesn't apply to all the use cases. It might be well and good to download ahead of time for the Come, Follow Me curriculum which was designed for it... but....

People are now scouring the net for inspirational videos, many on youtube and other sites are just not downloadable - teachers, leaders are frustrated - and we are not meeting their needs.

The problem is that FMG and Church IT are looking at this (or at least the instructions coming out to us) only as a scenario for the Come, Follow Me curriculum - The problem is much larger!

I am getting it from all over. I downloaded every bit of video from the medialibrary.lds.org site, all the CES stuff, and many of my experiences are related to helping someone show a video that is just not downloadable. viewing it and bringing it in pre-viewed is tenuous... at best. With thousands of videos prepared ahead of time and available in the clerk office to stream, people are choosing to look elsewhere for videos.

We either need to clamp down on this pick your own random web site inspirational video thing or make our Internet infrastructure more robust. We are expending too much energy, resources, and frustrated people to make the limited savings on Internet Connectivity worth it in my estimation.

Maybe after next week we can take BSA Scout Registration money and designate it for Meetinghouse Internet costs.

When I try to download the youth videos (The Plan of Salvation) it loads on my laptop as a winamp file, and only plays back the audio. Is there a setting I need to change on my laptop to get it to be viewed and heard?
Cragg Rogers

Rogers, it sounds like a file association issue. Maybe right click the file and choose to open in media player or my personal choice vlc. http://www.videolan.org/

John, thanks for sharing my frustration but that doesn't help my scenario any Your last line made me smile though.

From what web site are you downloading the videos? Can you give us the URL for a specific video you tried to download in which only the audio file was downloaded? What is your operating system and the browser you are using?

When I download the video from the Aaronic Priesthood page, I first click the video link and then click the "Download" link found just below the right corner of imbedded video. I can either watch the video while it is downloading or I pause it if I have already seen it previously.

As I mentioned in the original post, it is Ty's story at mormonsandgays.org. I understand that sites work differently that is why I specified it. That page is flash and so I can't post a direct link to the video.

svreed, I'm sorry I was responding to the crrogers post. Your situation has been answered by rolandc. It is not possible to download the videos on that site currently.

Hi,
I'm running into an issue trying to download:

Family Home Storage – Meet Jean

Video:
A series of family home storage stories.
https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage?lang=eng

I discovered by right clicking on the video that it streams through LDS.org using the "Brightcove" video cloud service. There is no way currently to download the video to my computer without having to get into a hackers type coding solution which is laid out step by step online by someone, but it goes beyond what I'm able to reasonably follow. There is a Firefox add-on that was created to download any embedded Brightcove streaming video, but on trying to access it there is a message from Mozilla indicating the plugin had been "removed by the developer". (I'm speculating, but it looks to me like it was removed because of Brightcove)

Any suggestions? I have the same issue of too many users on the network at church because of phones automatically logging on in the building. Even though they aren't using the Internet, buffering is a major issue and it makes playing the video a nightmare. Mostly because even if the buffering can be forgiven, to see the video I have to run the (3 minute) video through a projector setup rather than being able to create a DVD. Very frustrating and lots of setup for a 3 min video.
Help!
Thanks.
Alexander Jenkins
(Stake Technology specialist)

The church has indicated that some things cannot be downloaded due to copyright restrictions.

If that is the case with this video, then I think the only (legal) option you have is to play the video ahead of time and let it load completely. Then it should play with no problem.