NowComment has two different ways of treating streaming media commenting:
All video documents work best our 2-pane (default) view.
Videos hosted by YouTube and Vimeo will have a blue toolbar on the top edge of the media player in NowComment (similar to our image commenting toolbar) with three controls:
Note: when you start making a comment the media player stops immediately so you don't lose your place in the video stream while you're concentrating on what you're writing.
Clicking on a vertical comment bar will scroll your screen to highlight the corresponding comments without moving the video's progress bar from its current position; this lets you see what others are saying without losing your place in the stream. Clicking on the timestamp header above the text of a comment (i.e. the right pane in 2-pane view) will move the progress bar to that point in the stream (e.g. in the screenshot above, clicking “00:27” in the right comment pane will move the left pane video to the 27 second point in the video) and the video will immediately start playing from that point.
Note: we can integrate other 3rd party sites with NowComment at a very reasonable cost. Please contact us if your school or organization would like NowComment to support in-context commenting for SoundCloud, C-SPAN, CNN, or other audio/video sites.
Vimeo uses a paper airplane icon as its “Share” button; clicking on will bring you to a page with, among other things, the video embed code. Above the far right end of the embed code text box is a link that reads “+ Show options”. Click on that link to see important options. For the NowComment commenting toolbar to work properly with Vimeo, you need to either:
Once the options are visible, for “Size” choose “Fixed Size” rather than the default “Responsive”.
You can still comment on videos embedded from any other site that allows embedding, but comments on videos from other sites won't have an image commenting toolbar integrated with the media player; instead, for commenting purposes, the media player will be treated as if it were a paragraph of text, and you double click on the video's paragraph number to make your comment. For such comments on non-YouTube and non-Vimeo videos, if your comment is about a specific starting time or time segment in the media stream, start your comment's “Summary of Comment” field with the “time stamp” information, e.g. “6:20-6:33 — Mary Poppins blows in with the wind to apply for the nanny job.”
Last updated May 1, 2018