The xAPI Video Profile is a community specification — not an ADL core standard, but a widely adopted profile — that defines the exact verbs, activity types, and result fields to use when tracking video playback with xAPI. It specifies verbs such as "played," "paused," "seeked," "completed," and "interacted," along with result extensions for progress (a decimal 0–1), played segments (a set of time ranges), and session duration. Without this profile, different video platforms would each invent their own xAPI vocabulary, making statements from different tools impossible to aggregate or compare in the same LRS. By adopting the profile, a video player can emit statements that a standard xAPI analytics tool can immediately interpret without custom mapping. The profile is particularly useful for identifying re-watch behaviour — a learner seeking back to the same segment repeatedly — and for correlating video engagement with downstream assessment performance. Implementing the profile means instrumenting your video player to emit conformant statements on every significant playback event, whether through a custom HTML5 player, a wrapper around a third-party SDK, or an authoring tool's output. This instrumentation work is a one-time investment that pays dividends whenever you want to compare engagement metrics across different video content or player versions.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
The xAPI Video Profile standardises played, paused, seeked, and completed events, so reports from different players line up. We wrote seven volumes covering the whole video stack; for the xAPI Video Profile start with Volume 3 on players, trick play, and QoE, with encoding in Volume 1 and AI analysis of engagement in Volume 7. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Implementing the xAPI Video Profile in your own player?
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