Google and Bing search engines have terrible records when it comes to user privacy. They data mine and sell user data to advertisers without users consent. Even worse, they do not show accurate search results. Instead, they censor alternative points of view and shadow ban websites that criticize governments and large corporations. Duck Duck Go, announced in March 2022 that they will also start censoring their search results. Startpage also censors results because they use the Google Search engine. Therefore, if we want balanced search results that list both sides of a debate, we need to replace Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go with alternative search engines. Four good search engines to consider are Gibiru, Search Encrypt, Mojeek and Brave Search.

Gibiru… The Private Search Engine Gibiru search is that it qualifies as a “private search engine.” This style of search tool has become much more popular in recent years as Google’s sins have accumulated, and have then been made public. The idea behind most of them is to offer ways to search the web without giving away personal data (or at least having the chance to consent to any data usage).

The Gibiru search engine bills itself as “uncensored anonymous search”. When users search for terms using Gibiru search, the content of their searches is not logged or linked to an IP address. So there’s profiling individual web users. Gibiru doesn’t sell any information to third parties. When you submit a Gibiru search, you’ll see “all results” and “uncensored” options. The uncensored option lets you see all results that won’t appear in Google searches.

The common video sizes are ratios of 16 by 9 or 4 by 3. Thus, any free background videos you download are likely to be one of these two aspect ratios. This can be a problem if you want a background video for a module that is 16 by 4.5 or 16 by 16. In this article, we will explain how to use Open Shot to add custom aspect ratios to their list of options. We will then explain how to resize and crop a video to fit whatever size you need for your website module video backgrounds.

Download and Change the Appearance of Open Shot
You can download a free video editing program called Open Shot from the Debian Software Center. Then from the Debian Start icon, go to Sound and Video category and click on Open Shot to open it.

You can change the appearance of Open Shot to a light background by clicking Edit Preferences and changing the default theme from dark to no theme. Then close and open Open Shot again. Click Views, Views, Simple View.

Create a Custom Profile for Open Shot
A profile is a collection of video settings (size, frame rate, aspect ratio). Profiles are used during editing, previewing, and exporting to provide a quick way to switch between common combinations of these settings.

One of the first steps in editing any video is to choose the Profile for the Video Preview Panel. Click File, Select Profile to see this popup:

Joomla modules are boxes of content you can place on any page of your website and in any position on any page. Joomla modules can also be any width and any height and can contain almost any content. They typically contain a Title, a one sentence description and a link to more information which takes the reader to a separate page. Joomla modules are commonly displayed with a background color or background image to set them apart from the rest of the content on the page. You can make a Joomla module even more distinctive and eye catching by adding a video background to the module. In this article, we will describe two ways to add a video background to a Joomla module.

We will focus on creating a full width header module with a video background and text in the foreground - but the same steps apply to creating a row with two or even three modules. Here is an image from one of our Joomla header module with a video background.

To see this header module with the video background, go to this website: https://collegeintheclouds.org/

This article is divided into the following four parts:

Part 1 Find or Make Short Free Short Background Videos

Part 2 Add a Video Background using a Free Joomla Extension

Part 3 Add a Video Background using HTML and CSS

Part 4 Edit Background Videos with Open Shot

Part 1 Find or Make Free Short Background Videos
The first step is finding short videos. Because we will load them into our website media manager, each video should have a file size of less than 20 MB. Anything more than 20 MB will severely slow down your page loading speed. This means the duration of the video will likely be less than 30 seconds. Common sources for free video backgrounds include YouTube.com and Pixabay.com. We will also provide a few background videos on our course Free Downloads page. You can also create your own video backgrounds using any camera or computer screen capture tool. Here is what these videos look like in my home computer file manager after downloading them:

Load the Background Videos to your Joomla Website
One option is to load your background videos to a video hosting service like YouTube. The problem with this option is that a link to a remote server will take a longer time to load the page. Also, if YouTube ever changes the link or takes down the video channel, your background images will stop displaying. We therefore recommend loading background videos to your website server provided that the videos have a file size less than 20 MB.