It appears that 1500k is the default max file upload in WPMU, or that the admin team has initially set this very, very low limit. Even a 5 minute mp3 audio podcast won’t fit in the limits.

I did notice that one “error” indicated that 50M was the limit, which seems quite reasonable. But 1500k just won’t work if we imagine students posting audio and video clips they produce, extended powerpoints, even high quality images or PDFs. It may be that there are a

Obviously, remote hosting of the media is possible. And there’s a value in learning to bring together in one place media housed at various locations in the cloud. But it seems a bit more cumbersome than necessary in an environment where a terabyte of hard drive space runs about $100, and less in bulk.

Not sure if I missed it on the first run through the installed plug-ins, or if the admin team is very active with add-ons for users, but after spending some time today trying to get a Youtube video to show in a Page I noticed the “wordTube” plugin.

I activated it, found a wordTube link in the Media area of the dashboard, and added a Youtube video. Cool.

After some finagling I sorted out the method for getting the video to load in the page.

Here’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” by Michael Wesch, as a video embedded in a blog entry:

[media=1]

Nice. Easy. Unattractive!

Positioning and resizing a wordtube video in a post

Dumping a video on the page is one thing. Getting it to look good by positioning and resizing is something else.

I was able to resize the wordtube media with a little code, and to center the media by wrapping it in a div and affixing an inline style of center to it. No sweat, though it would be nice for students if this could be handled through buttons.

Here’s a cheesy caption one might put beneath the video

If you know your way around an html element or two, and a little about css, the following will help you out. If you don’t know about html/css, you probably want to just wait for some new plugin or enhancement to wordtube.

• Code I used to adjust media size: media=# width=xxx height=xxx
• Code I used to center the media: div style=”text=align:center

Loading the video into a “portfolio” page

Here it is loaded onto a page nested within the Courses area of the sandbox eportfolio. (Scroll to the bottom of that page for the link(s).

I tried to adjust the default size of the video in the page by modifying preferences in wordTube. While I thought I had made the mods, I’m not seeing a resized video. I suspect this is because I’m grabbing a smaller version of the Youtube video. (More tweaking will provide answers.)