xAPI for VLC Media Player: Tracking Offline Video Engagement

The VLC Media Player has long been considered the best free video player available for download.

It plays movies and video clips up to 8K resolution, as well as 360-degree videos and videos in compressed file formats. And because it lives on your desktop or in apps on your phone, it can provide an offline video experience — perfect whether you are on the road or off at sea.

VLC in Learning and Training

In learning and training contexts, VLC is perfect for offline scenarios — such as training healthcare workers in remote locations or sailors at sea. But, up until now, it was not easy to connect the VLC Media Player with modern learning analytics tools.

Enter the new xAPI VLC plugin from Yet Analytics. This open source capability, distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, provides the ability to track activity and generate xAPI data directly from the VLC Media Player.

What does this mean?

This new plugin allows you to send xAPI statements from the VLC Media Player to an xAPI Learning Record Store (such as SQL LRS). So you now have the ability to track events that occur in the player — including when a user plays, pauses, or stops a video. Duration is inherently derivable as the xAPI data includes immutable timestamps of all activity.

Who cares?

If you are working in an offline environment and need to track video engagement, you now have a free and open source option. Whether for audit and compliance purposes or in order to track on-demand video engagement out in the field, we’ve got you covered.

Check out the capability on GitHub and reach out if you need help either implementing or supporting.