To film video natively on the app and save the video files to the cloud storage straight-away is one of the awaited features to have.
Saving video and audio file such as MP4, MP3 can be done by simply set up the data field type to “File” Then we have link to the those files with hyperlink but not able to view on the appsheet app.
This is super easy tricks.
Apart from file type data field, add virtual column with show type.
Set category to “Video”
And put the simple expression of text([Video File]), which will automatically create the public URL to access to the saved file and can be consumed in Show type column.
By doing so, we dont need to host the video/audio files in Youtube or other place, and als we don t need to employ any other third party service. Just done by simple column set ups.
I just tried it for an mp3. It works quite well. There are a couple of problems, though:
On my iPhone, the app goes to a black screen to play the video but on my Android phone it plays within the app.
On the Android phone, it would be nice if there could just be a bar for the audio – the space required for a video is not necessary.
Still, this is a very helpful tip for me. I hope the AppSheet platform will provide more support for playing mp3s inside of apps in the future. We need to have the same user experience in both Android and iOS.
By the way, it would also be nice to be able to play mp3s in the background . . . without a progress bar.
I also want to thank you for this tip, its a good feature. Additionally, what I have found is the following,
When you play a video or music file when using appsheet on mobile, the file will stop playing when you navigate to a different view, but if its on a tablet or PC (with tablet mode / externally opened) the media will keep on playing. This is the same whether the video is played from your cloud storage folder or an Embed from Youtube. The only workaround for this on mobile is to open the file and then click the back button on your mobile.
Even though the mutimedia player on appsheet has controls for looping, afaik there is no way to tell the audio / video file to loop, or to auto play. It would be nice if this was possible for files that we ourselves have stored on the cloud (and not dependent on Youtube changing how they handle auto play / embed codes etc). Maybe this feature is there and I just havent read about it yet?
Even though the mutimedia player on appsheet has controls for looping, afaik there is no way to tell the audio / video file to loop, or to auto play. It would be nice if this was possible for files that we ourselves have stored on the cloud (and not dependent on Youtube changing how they handle auto play / embed codes etc). Maybe this feature is there and I just havent read about it yet?
I believe you need to post a feature request to get that function.
I’m coming back to this after putting it on the back burner for a long, long time. Today I tested a little app in which I have a “file” type column. It was very easy for me to upload little mp3 files from my computer and from my Android device via the app but not from my iPhone. On my iPhone, media files (mp3s and mp4s and other audio files) were greyed out. Was I doing something wrong or is that a current limitation of AppSheet on iOS?
I remember I personnely dicussed with AppSheet team before, but file picker on iOS is not currently recognizing the mp4 / mp3 type of file to upload. So yes, there is limitation for iOS.
Thanks for the quick response. All the more reason for AppSheet to workout some way of recording and saving audio and video within iOS. Perhaps that will come after everything gets worked out on Android phones (apparently, testing is underway now, though I am not participating).
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Are the videos still playable correctly on iOS if it was uploaded via Android?
Using this file and show column trick, is the manual sync needed?
Thanks!
