Video Source

Owned by Alex Yoffe
Last updated: Oct 29, 2024 by Sara Cunha
3 min read

Opening video files

In OOONA Tools, you can work with media files located on your computer or stream media from any accessible URL, including YouTube, Amazon S3, or your own hosted MP4, MPEG DASH, and HLS streams.
For local playback, we support MP4 or MOV (h.264 video codec) or WEBM.
Legacy video formats, such as WMV, AVI, and MPEG, are NOT natively supported by the Google Chrome browser.
If you plan to work with a video file from your hard drive, or video URL, go to Media > Open video/audio file.

This dialog allows opening a video or audio asset the user will be working with.


The available options are the following:

  • Browse your computer (to open a media file from your computer's hard drive);

  • Load a video from a URL (e.g. paste an S3 or YouTube link);

  • Select a media file saved in your Dropbox;

  • Load an empty video (green screen)

Note, When opening a video/audio file from the computer's hard drive, the Pro version (with OOONA Agent installed) will automatically generate audio waveform and shot-change data, and will prompt a dialog box asking if the user desires to change FPS settings on the project if they do not match the video's FPS. If you don't have OOONA Agent installed, make sure to uncheck Analyze with OOONA's Agent box.

In the open dialog, click Browse your Computer (if you have a saved copy of the video) or paste a web address in Load URL (if you want to work with a video from the internet)
If your video has embedded or burnt-in timecode (e.g. 01:00:00:00 or 10:00:00:00), you need to specify the timecode of the first frame as Media Start Timecode.
However, you can always do it at a later stage of your work.
If you have selected Browse your Computer, choose your video from its location and the video should appear in the player.

Supported video formats

OOONA's Toolkit supports the formats which can be played by Google Chrome browser natively.
This means you can use 
.MP4 or .MOV with h.264 video codec (AVC)
or .WEBM 
with stereo or mono audio.

We recommend working with MP4 files (h.264 video codec) due to their cross-platform compatibility.
Some video converters default to older h.263 codec when creating .MP4 files - in this case the video will not be displayed. The solution will be to re-encode the video with h.264 codec.
You can drag a video to a new browser tab and make sure it's playable in the browser.

For adaptive streaming over HTTP, OOONA Tools player supports HLS and MPEG-DASH.