Decide & stage removal of waffle flag: `useVideoGalleryFlow`

[farhan]

• Flag name: useVideoGalleryFlow
• Flag details: Controls whether adding/editing a video opens the video selection gallery (on) or the legacy XBlock editor modal (off).
• Removal date: It has been passed (2023-06-01, ~3 years ago).
• Current status: Currently disabled by default; can be enabled via the waffle flag new_core_editors.use_video_gallery_flow.

What to do in this ticket

1. Involve stakeholders / product owners to discuss and decide on the future of this flag.
2. If we decide to enable it by default:
   1. Enable it by default in openedx-platform.
   2. Roll it out and gather feedback from the community.
   3. As a follow-up step, remove the waffle flag controlling this feature — provided we confirm it should remain an out-of-the-box feature.

References

• Original feature PR: [FAL-3375] Feat: Adding video selection gallery page to the routes #461
• Flag PR: [FAL-3383] feat: New waffleflag to enable or disable new video editor flow openedx-platform#32024

/cc @ChrisChV — what are your thoughts on the removal of this flag?

[farhan]

I did a quick (shallow) end-to-end test of the feature. Here are my testing notes:

Testing Steps

1. Enable the feature via the waffle flag

Set new_core_editors.use_video_gallery_flow to Yes for everyone in the waffle-flags table:

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2. Feature activated

Go to Studio course → Add New Component → Video. With the flag on, a new dialog opens offering "Drag and drop video here or click to upload" (the video selection gallery flow) instead of the legacy XBlock editor modal:

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3. Direct upload needs the video pipeline environment

Uploading a video directly fails — it crashes on my local tutor dev setup, and on the PR sandbox too. The POST /videos/<course_id> request returns "Failed to upload video" (HTTP 404) because direct uploads need the S3-based video upload pipeline (ENABLE_VIDEO_UPLOAD_PIPELINE + VIDEO_UPLOAD_PIPELINE + a configured bucket), which isn't set up out of the box. This is an environment requirement, not specific to this flag; didn't test it within the feature.

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4. Verified via an alternative (embed-by-URL) approach

This doesn't exercise the direct-upload path, but tried to validates the gallery flow somehow. Following this approach, I uploaded the
video as a file via Course → Content → Files, copied it via Copy Web Url option, and pasted it into the gallery dialog's "Paste your video ID or URL" field:

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5. Result

The video (uploaded as a file and embedded by URL) was added and plays fine:

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Ending Notes:

Note: I think a proper regression pass is needed for this feature. I ran into error banners across different user flows, and I'm not sure they'll behave correctly even after the video pipeline is configured.

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Work will be needed if we enable this feature by default:

• All setup environments (tutor dev, sandbox) setups should work on enabling of the flag
• Keep this feature sync up the video pipeline enable flag

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Some useful references I read while looking into the Video Pipeline things:

• Enable Video Upload on CMS (Tutor)
• edx-video-pipeline (VEDA) — Open edX Wiki

[farhan]

FYI @feanil — testing notes and references (@claude assisted) have been added on this story. This is ready to forward to the product wg for feature decision.

My experience summary:
I think this feature needs some regression testing and additional work before it's ready to enable by default.