Support video into PDF

[Intelligent2013]

Source ticket: metanorma/metanorma#338

Investigate how to support video (H.264) in the PDF.

[Intelligent2013]

Apache FOP doesn't support richmedia.
PDFBox doesn't support richmedia annotations (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-5495).

So, the solutions are:

• add video as PDF attachment and add the link to the attachment.
• add the link to the external video file.

[ronaldtse]

In this case it would definitely be important for FOP to first support PDF 2.0…

Both solutions you proposed are important use cases, and both also apply to things outside of just video.

[Intelligent2013]

For testing purposes, I've prepared the PDF example with videos:

• internet link
• local link on disk
• embedded PDF

For the presentation XML (it's prototype, manually created):

<p>Link to the video sample on http site: <video src="https://test-videos.co.uk/vids/bigbuckbunny/mp4/h264/1080/Big_Buck_Bunny_1080_10s_30MB.mp4"/></p>
<p></p>
<p>Link to the video sample on disk in the same folder with pdf: <video src="Big_Buck_Bunny_1080_10s_2MB.mp4"/></p>
<p></p>
<p>Embedded video sample: <video src="Jellyfish_1080_10s_2MB.mp4" embedded="true"/></p>

Resulted PDF:
PDF_video_sample.zip

[ronaldtse]

@Intelligent2013 I can confirm that all 3 methods work in Adobe Acrobat Reader. All 3 methods fail in macOS Preview.

[Intelligent2013]

@ronaldtse I've tested in macOS Preview in my environment (MacOS BigSur, Preview 11.0 (1017)):

• internet link

Video is playing in the Safari browser.

• local link on disk

Shows the strange error:

If I double-click on .mp4 in the Finder directly, then QuickTime player plays the video successfully.

• embedded PDF

Nothing happens, because Preview doesn't support PDF attachments.

[petervwyatt]

Note that PDF 1.x supports Movie Annotations but these are deprecated in favour of RichMedia Annotations in PDF 2.0. Adobe Extension Level 3 added RichMedia annotations to PDF 1.7 before PDF 2.0 adopted them so as long as the correct Adobe extensions dictionary is added you can have them in PDF 1.7 also (but not PDF 1.6 or earlier. RichMedia annotations are more flexible and support any form of rich media beyond just movies - incl. 3D, etc.

Movie, Sound and 3D annotations are also not permitted in PDF/A-3 or PDF/A-4 files.
RichMedia annotations are allowed in PDF/A-4e files (the PDF/A-4e conformance level must be explicitly used).

As far as accessibility goes, movies should include subtitles (and audio files should include a transcription) but this is beyond what PDF specs technically require.

Support for any form of multimedia is also highly dependent on the PDF viewer used and possibly what additional SW is also installed.

Alternatives include:

• Link annotation to an external web URL (e.g. YouTube)
• attach the movie file as an embedded file either as a File Attachment annotation or an Associated File - it's then packaged and along for the ride but not directly playable in situ