You can provide yourself or other Paratext users with a desktop icon that can instantly access and play all of the Paratext videos locally and allows searching for videos by topic or content. As videos are updated for newer versions of Paratext, those videos will automatically be updated in the background using a program called Resilio Sync. If you don’t want the computer to download new videos automatically, you only need one computer in your location to get the updates, and you can copy them over periodically.
English video setup
Note that the English video collection includes many tools besides Paratext, like Bloom and Fieldworks.
Overview
- We will click on a URL for the shared videos, which takes us to a webpage.
- If needed, you will first install Resilio Sync, after which the video folder will be added to your computer and will start downloading all the videos.
- Then you will need to create a desktop shortcut for the Paratext video page and a shortcut for the folder with other videos to make them easy to find.
- Lastly, you can customize the icon for the Paratext videos to make it easier to identify.
C:\Users\{UserName}\Resilio Sync\Videos
Note: While I prefer to have the directory closer to the root, I have the experience of setting up the synchronization on many computers at a workshop, and it is very difficult to get users to manipulate directory structures, and it may be easier to just accept the default.
Connect
Clicking the blue connect button (#2 above) will start the synchronization. 3 GB may take a long time to download from the Internet, but Resilio Sync will also download the files from other Resilio users on the local network if the firewall permits it.
Desktop Shortcuts
Having the video files available is only part of the solution. It is important to access the Video Overview file that provides links and descriptions of all the videos as shown below:
This web page also allows for searching any topic by using Ctrl + F which will take you to the link for the corresponding video(s). Clicking the link opens the video in the same browser window and it starts playing immediately!
Create a shortcut to the video overview file
Here are the steps to create a shortcut to the Video Overview file:
- Open the Resilio Sync app on your computer.
- Click on the Videos folder:
- In the File Explorer window that opens
- Right-click on the
_video-overview.html
file - Go to Send to > Desktop (create shortcut)
- Right-click on the
- The desktop shortcut will have the browser’s icon like this (if using Chrome):
- Don’t leave it this way, as this is not very helpful! Rename the shortcut to “Paratext Videos”.
- If you really want to make it obvious, set the icon to the Paratext icon:
- Chinese (simplified) (0.5 GB)
- Chinese (traditional) (0.5 GB)
- French (1.2 GB)
- Indonesian (1.2 GB)
- Portuguese (1.2 GB)
- Russian (1.3 GB)
- Spanish (1 GB)
- Follow the create shortcut directions above, but open on the specific language folder in Resilio Sync:
- Create a shortcut for the appropriate HTML file in that folder.