Riverbend Stories

Video stories

Three short films made on the riverbank this term.

Where the video lives

None of these films are stored on this site

They are hosted on TRU MediaSpace (media.tru.ca), the university’s Kaltura service, and embedded here. That is the route to use: MediaSpace handles the storage, the streaming and the captions, and this site stays fast. Upload your footage there first, then embed it. The first two films below show the two ways of doing that.

1. Morning shift at the boat launch

Added with an oEmbed link

Sample embed — a TRU MediaSpace video, added with an oEmbed link.

A six-minute film following Dennis, who has swum at the public boat launch every morning since 1998. Shot over four mornings in April.

2. The salmon count

Added with the Embed code

Sample embed — the same MediaSpace video, added with the Embed code instead.

Ray Whitfield walks the same gravel bar every October with a mechanical tally counter. We followed him for two of those mornings.

3. Eleven days of water

Embedded from YouTube

Placeholder embed — replace with your own video.

A short piece assembled from neighbours’ phone footage of the 2018 flood, with narration recorded in the community hall.

On the film’s MediaSpace page open Share → oEmbed, pick a player size, and copy the short link — it looks like media.tru.ca/id/0_xxxxxxxx…. Back here, add an Embed block and paste it. WordPress recognises TRU MediaSpace and builds the player. Use the link from the oEmbed tab, not the address in the browser bar — the long one comes out as a plain link.

On the MediaSpace page open Share → Embed, choose a player size, copy the block of code, and paste it into a Custom HTML block. Use this when the oEmbed link cannot do what you need — a start and end time, or a specific player. Kaltura’s code has a fixed size, so swap width="400" height="285" for style="width:100%;aspect-ratio:608/402" to make it shrink on a phone.

If a film already lives on YouTube or Vimeo, paste its web address on its own line and WordPress builds the player. MediaSpace is the better home for coursework — it stays inside TRU — but this works the same way.

Please don’t upload video files

You can add a Video block and upload an MP4 straight to this site, and for a ten-second clip that is fine. For anything longer it is a bad trade: video files are large, uploads fail against the size limit, playback is slower, and there are no captions unless you make them yourself. MediaSpace solves all four. One caution: MediaSpace warns that taking either the Embed code or the oEmbed link makes that video public to the world, overriding the sharing settings on the entry.