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Receive external videos with the uploader widget

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Brendan O'Driscoll
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The Vidyard Uploader Widget is a way to let anyone upload videos without being logged into a Vidyard account. You can embed an ‘upload’ button on your website to collect videos from people who don’t have access to your Vidyard account. You can invite guests to upload videos from their computer, a FTP site, or they can record and upload a video instantly with a webcam.

There are tons of cool things you can do with this widget – here are a few examples:

  • Collect crowd-sourced video content on your website. Place the widget on a dedicated landing page to create a means for users to upload their personal video projects.
  • Allow people outside of your organization to upload videos while maintaining restricted or secure access to your Vidyard account. For example, if want to give an external vendor the ability to upload an outsourced video to your Vidyard account, you can build a landing page and have them upload the content with the uploader widget.

Essentially, this widget is useful any time you want an external user to upload videos to your account without giving out your password, or access to your other, internal or secure videos.

You can embed an Uploader Widget in two ways:

  1. You can host the widget on your own page using an iframe embed code
    If you use the iframe embed code, guests can upload content from inside your page.  If you want guests to stay on your page, you can use the iframe option, but it will take up space.
  2. You can simply embed a button on your page that will direct guests to the widget on an external page.
    An embedded button will take guests to a page on secure.vidyard.com to use the Uploader Widget. If you prefer a subtler option, the button is a nice touch – but guests will leave your page to access the uploader.

To build and embed an uploader widget:

  1. In the Content menu, click Uploaders.
    In Content menu, click Uploaders.
  2. To create a new uploader widget, click New Widget.
    Note: To change an existing widget, click Edit. To preview an existing widget, click Preview. To delete an existing widget, click the trashcan icon.
    Widget options, including Create New Widget interface
  3. Name the uploader in the Name field.
    Note: This name is to identify this uploader to you, and will not be visible to the public.
  4. Set the Look and Feel that you want:
  • Customize the Button Text, which is the message that will appear on the Uploader button. A preview of the button appears to the right.
  • Specify the height and width of the iframed widget to determine its size within your page.
    Customize the look and feel of the uploader widget and button
  1. If you need to organize uploads from many different guests, add tags into the Tags field. This will tag all the videos uploaded through that widget with those terms.
  2. Select from the ON/OFF toggle switches what actions the user can perform (i.e. uploading multiple files, changing the video name, etc.)
    Note: Both the Upload video from computer and Record webcam video options cannot be set to OFF at the same time.
    Options available that determine what users of the uploader widget are allowed to do
  3. If you want to secure your uploader, turn on Enable Domain Restrictions, and specify the allowed domain in the field provided.
  4. Optionally enter a webhook URL.
    Note: You may enter a webhook URL if you would like to have our server do a POST request to the specified URL when the video is finished encoding.
  5. When you are finished building your uploader widget, copy the button or iFrame code to embed on your desired landing page.
  6. Click Save Changes.

Note: When building the uploader widget, you can specify which sources you will allow users to upload video from (i.e. Gmail, Dropbox, GitHub, Skydrive, etc.)

Note:If you want to limit the uploader widget to only allow for uploading or recording, this can be managed through the addition of a query string to the widget's embed URL on your page. Just add the options[]= string and specify either record or upload. You will get something that looks like:

Record Only:

<input type="button"onclick="javascript:window.open('https://secure.vidyard.com/uploader_widgets/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?options[]= record','_blank', 'width=750, height=500, resizable=yes, scrollbars=yes, menubar=yes')"value="Click here to upload”/>

Upload Only:

<input type="button"onclick="javascript:window.open('https://secure.vidyard.com/uploader_widgets/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?options[]= upload','_blank', 'width=750, height=500, resizable=yes, scrollbars=yes, menubar=yes')"value="Click here to upload"/>

Note: If you want to specify different tags for each embed location of the same uploader, you can simply add a query string in the widget’s URL or embed location to specify one or more tags for that location. Just add to the embed code or URL tags=, then specify your tags.

Here’s what it will look like:

<input type="button"onclick="javascript:window.open('https://secure.vidyard.com/uploader_widgets/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&tags=emailAddress,memberId', '_blank', 'width=750, height=500, resizeable=yes, menubar=yes,)"value="Click here to upload"/>

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