[Building Sakai] Videos and Sakai

Fri Mar 29 14:34:31 PDT 2013

It also doesn't directly solve the "putting videos in Sakai and making them available" use case, but since Matterhorn was brought up, I wanted to also mention Avalon Media System as another related open source project: http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/

Our focus in Avalon has been on video ingested from library and archive collections, but we do plan to work on an LMS integration (probably LTI-based) and are interested in how Avalon might help with use cases beyond the ones we're initially focused on. We use Matterhorn to handle backend video processing/transcoding tasks and also use Matterhorn's Engage player, but content management, metadata, and access control/authorization are implemented on a Hydra/Fedora stack, plus Red5 or Adobe Media Server for delivery.

Jon

---
Jon Dunn
Interim Assistant Dean for Library Technologies and Digital Libraries
Indiana University Bloomington Libraries
jwd at iu.edu
(812) 855-0953

From: Matthew Jones <matthew at longsight.com<mailto:matthew at longsight.com>>
Date: Thursday, March 28, 2013 5:19 PM
To: Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com<mailto:steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>>
Cc: "sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>" <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>>
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Videos and Sakai

Hmm, I'm not sure where I saw 2000.

Anyway, they were on a 4-6 month schedule and did plan 1.4 to be out at last summers unconference, but it's slipped and still isn't released. (Perhaps also consistent with us?)

I still don't know enough about the LTI hookup and what it offers to know if it would work out as a general remote video repository. I've set-it up and played with it for about 20 hours and from what I saw in 1.3, the answer was it wasn't possible with what was available by default. You can upload videos, it can encode the videos but the integration with anything external wasn't too obvious. There was this ticket that Dave Horwitz was working on, but some of the tasks were still open and pushed back to 1.5? So it might be a good solution, eventually.

https://opencast.jira.com/browse/MH-8311

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com<mailto:steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>> wrote:
FYI, Matterhorn 1.3 was released March 2012, and had pretty regular releases before that. Fairly consistent with our major release cycle ;)

Matterhorn might be worth exploring, decoupling the media repo and player from the lecture capture, if at all possible.

cheers,
Steve

On 29/03/2013, at 12:51 AM, Matthew Jones <matthew at longsight.com<mailto:matthew at longsight.com>> wrote:

I don't see that as the biggest problem, I see re-encoding whatever the user uploads as a web compatible format to be the biggest problem. They can't just put in a .wmv, .mov, or a .3gp. Browsers won't play it and users would have to download it and figure it out. It would also probably be poorly compressed, leading to that large cost of backup.

Right now you need to convert anything uploaded to both H.264 (Because that's the only format Internet Explorer plays) and WebM (Because Firefox won't play H.264, except on Windows, in the newest nightly, if you enable an option). This conversion isn't possible in Java, Matterhorn has scripts that do it with ffmpeg or some other tool. Since you have to store 2 video files (and *possibly* the original for some future day when it can be re-converted) it further increases the storage requirements. Youtube seems to store like 10 different versions of the same file in different resolutions.

If your instructors or support staff properly convert and upload your videos locally (maybe using Handbrake) in the correct format to Sakai, you can use the movie player link (Strobe) to play your video from any tool or from Lessons, but it doesn't do that part for you.

Do you have any ideas of a remote video repository?

- I guess Kaltura hosted and the integration is pretty good but it has a high cost to it. The Community Source Edition according to this review [1] just keeps trying to sell you up to the the hosted version and I never had luck in the past getting it to work (expect at least a few days to a week of developer time to try to get anything going out of it).
- Octopus Video [2] (mostly a Drupal module) hasn't been updated in over a year,  isn't straightforward to setup but seemed promising with a little LTI integration work.
- Matterhorn hasn't had a new release (1.4) in 3 years and is mostly aimed at automated lecture capture rather than ad-hoc video repository hosting, though maybe the UCT LTI mods improved upon that.

[1] http://www.timmmmyboy.com/2013/01/why-im-getting-rid-of-kaltura-and-why-you-should-too/
[2] http://www.octopusvideo.org/

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Adam Marshall <adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk<mailto:adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:
The biggest problem we faced concerning videos in sakai is the cost of backups. Disc space these days is cheap but backing up files is not; adding the storage of videos would vastly increase disc usage and therefore the cost of keeping backup .

Our (as yet unimplemented) idea was to create a clone of the resources tool which stores its files in a different location to the regular tool, we would then o A vocabulary file not to backup the alternative filestore.

Adam

-----Original Message-----
From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org> [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org>] On Behalf Of Ciellie
Sent: 28 March 2013 11:17
To: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Subject: [Building Sakai] Videos and Sakai

We need to address the issue of videos, animations similations etc (learning objects). not lecture capturing in sakai, and need your help on this.

We're thinking of something like a local "youtube" like implementation for this, but need to ask you

1) Is video within sakai's resources an option? We want to upgrade to sakai
2.9.1 in June if not, what kind of software do you recommend.
3) What is Matterhorn's limitations if any in providing a service like this. We are planing a Matterhorn implimentation pilot for the second half on 2013, but this will be for lecture capturing only.

Thank you for the help

Ciellie

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