Do you ever need to quickly share a video with someone? I do, nearly every day…it might be a quick how-to video, to show someone how to do something with QMplus or one of our other learning applications. It might be that I’ve found a bug in QMplus (no…never!) and I want to show my colleagues in IT services what’s happening so they can investigate, or I might want to show one of our software suppliers how their product works in our environment. Whatever it is, often the best way is not an email but a quick video showing exactly what I mean. But video files are large and so attaching them to an email is not necessarily the way to go. What to do?

There’s a really handy feature in QMplus Media, our institutional media server, which allows you to generate a shareable link for any of your videos which you can send to anyone you like. If you’ve used the “unlisted video” feature in YouTube…it’s very like that. The person viewing the video doesn’t need to have an account on QMplus Media to view the video so it’s particularly handy when communicating with people outside the organisation.

So…how do you do it? Well…really the best way to show you is…through a video. If you’d really rather read, you can find the instructions in our Share a link to a video on QMplus Media guide.

Why not just use YouTube (or Vimeo or whatever your favourite video hosting solution is)?

If you’re already a YouTube user, why not just use YouTube to share your video? Well, of course you can if you want. However…if you are not a YouTube user, or if you want to keep YouTube for personal stuff…this is a good solution. Once you have your video on QMplus Media, there’s lots of things you can do with it…you can generate captions for it, add clickable hotspots, even turn it into a video quiz….amazing.

I’m trying to do what you’ve done and I can’t log in to QMplus Media

If you’ve tried to log in to QMplus Media…and you can’t…this means you don’t have an account yet. You can fix this by logging in to QMplus, going to your QMplus dashboard and clicking on the My Media link. This will create your account on QMplus Media.

Why can’t I do this through QMplus?

While it is possible to access your videos through QMplus, it is not possible to access the functionality to make a video unlisted. This functionality is only available through logging in to QMplus Media through the web-based interface, MediaSpace. Sorry.

But I don’t want just anyone to be able to see my video

Using this method, anyone that gets hold of the link to your video will be able to see it. If you don’t want this, and the person you are sharing the video with is at QMUL then there are more secure ways that you can share your video. If you need a more secure way of sharing with someone outside of QMUL…I’m afraid QMplus Media probably isn’t your best solution. Sorry.