Sunday, October 10, 2010
I arrived in New York on Thursday, September 30th to attend the OVC which began the following morning. This is the 2nd annual OVC. I attended the 2009 conference as well. OVC is organized by the Mozilla Foundation to promote development of open source technologies and best practices in open video. The OVC mantra is “open source, open standards, open formats, and open access.” Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org/) is a huge and credible player in this space, as the developer of the Firefox browser and other open source software. The OVC was attended by about 1000 people from all over the world. You can get more insight etc from the Twitter feed which is #OVC10.
The following notes present the main topics and takeaways from my perspective. I’ll throw in some personal impressions as well. Above all, it seems to me that many great ideas about tools and methods were only concepts at last year’s OVC. This year they are working products, albeit in some cases rough around the edges.
Some of the following notes will be somewhat technical, but I try to present what is significant about the projects covered from a user’s perspective. The basic themes of the OVC were:
- HTML5
- Openness and how to facilitate open access
- Open Source tools in development and practice
- Media archives, metadata, management, and storage
- Remixing media as a focus of culture, education, and digital citizenship
The full schedule of the OVC is here: http://www.openvideoconference.org/agenda/
Friday, October 1, 2010
HTML5 player showcase/How to Build an HTML5 player - (10:30 AM - 11:45 AM)
Presenters:
Chris Blizzard — Mozilla
Philippe Le Hegaret — W3C
Steve Heffernan — VideoJS and Zencoder
Jeroen Wijering — LongTail Video
Steve Heffernan from http://videojs.com presented details on video.js, an open source HTML5-based video player. HTML5 is the newest format for web pages, and includes many improvements over HTML4 including native support for playing audio and video in HTML5-compliant browsers. HTML4 relied upon external players to play media files, like RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, QuickTime Player, various Flash-based players, etc. This has been a real nightmare for web developers, since you have to account for different users and systems using different formats and players. In theory, HTML5 solves this by providing a standard way to play media files directly in the browser, by using a or tag which points to the media file you want to play. In theory. The problem is, the designers of the different browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.) implement HTML5 in slightly different ways, just as they did with HTML4. The situation is vastly improved, but not yet as simple as we (website developers and users) want.
So video.js, like other HTML5 player code solutions, addresses the remaining cross-browser inconsistencies by providing “fall back” code that plays the media file in case the browser doesn’t support the recommended HTML5 method. This requires some JavaScript and some html code providing several options, including alternative media files in different formats.
JWPlayer (http://www.longtailvideo.com/) takes this same approach. We use JWPlayer on the Illinois Public Media website, although we have yet to implement the latest version which is 5.3. The developer of JWPlayer 5.3 presented his solution for HTML5 incompatibilities in various browsers. JWPlayer provides some very slick skinning and an API for injecting a wide range of variables into the player, creating playlists, and providing other advanced functionalities and features.
Philippe Le Hegaret from the W3C then did a live 20-minute demo of how to build an HTML5 player with skinnable controls using JavaScript and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG is another W3C standard (technically, it’s a “recommendation” just like html itself) for creating flexible and scalable graphics based on pixel coordinates instead of actual images. With SVG you can create elaborate animations in the browser without using Flash. Philippe Le Hegaret demonstrated building a media player using inkscape (http://inkscape.org/), an open source SVG authoring tool. In 20 minutes, very impressive.
Public Spaces, Private Infrastructure - (11:30 AM - 12:15 PM)
Presenters:
Ethan Zuckerman - Co-founder, Global Voices, Senior Fellow at Harvard Berkman Center
Lawrence Liang - Lawyer, public intellectual, Alternative Law Forum Bangalore
Trebor Scholz - The New School
The HTML5 player session went late (like most OVC sessions ☹) so I caught only the end of this session. The discussion was about how we use “the cloud” without thinking about it, e.g. when we upload a video to YouTube, post our pictures on Flickr, or conduct our social interactions on Facebook. We don’t own these services, but we entrust them with our information and media. They seem to be public spaces, but their owners can change their Terms of Service any time they like with no recourse. This has serious implications for privacy, and for preserving access to public and private media objects. And most casual users of the Internet don’t even think about it.
I spoke with a number of people about this dilemma during the OVC. The idea of a “public cloud” seems to resonate with lots of us, wherein non-profit institutions could provide cloud services including long-term storage, with a commitment to trust, openness, and sustainability. Universities and the supercomputing centers around the U.S. could play a key role in providing this public infrastructure. I know there is some interest on their part, especially since NSF funding for the computer centers has diminished in recent years. It seems to me this is a big idea worth exploring, but it will require vision and leadership to build a consensus and get something actually done.
One example illustrates the need. WGBH/Boston is far ahead of most public TV stations in building online media archives. Peter Pinch manages WGBH’s Open Vault project, which provides thousands of open media archives as curriculum materials. Peter told me they’re using Amazon Web Services to encode and host their media collections. The advantages: it’s inexpensive, easy to set up, and they don’t have to maintain the servers and infrastructure. The big disadvantage: if Amazon decides to change their policy, or 20 years from now goes out of business, WGBH’s media collections could simply disappear. They would have to recreate everything from the original source files, assuming WGBH continues to manage them.
Another possibility is simply using the Internet Archive. I spoke with Tracey Jaquith, Web Engineer & Data Archivist at the IA, about their capacities for hosting large media collections. She says the IA is committed and funded to provide unlimited, permanent storage of both access files (i.e. streaming media hosting) and original source files. The IA can provide various tools for uploading and managing content, including an API so you can build you own tools. My feeling is we should simply begin using the Internet Archive as one repository for our digital media collections. I would never put all our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and the best strategy would be to have several copies of everything in different baskets. How many and where is the question, but I think using the IA as one basket is probably a great idea.
HTML5 Delivery Across Platforms: Overcoming Challenges - (12:30 PM - 1:30 PM)
Presenters:
Brian Crescimanno - Brightcove
Michael Dale - Kaltura
Andrew Pile, Brian Joe & Ryan - Vimeo
I missed most of this session since everything was running late, and I got talking with Shay David from Kaltura instead of attending the session about Kaltura. Kaltura (http://www.kaltura.org/) is an open source video platform for creating, publishing, and managing media in an institutional environment. The Kultura corporation sells a number of services including hosting and support, with clients like many of the Ivy League universities. Shay claims Kaltura easily integrates with Learning Management Systems, and CMSs including Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla. (During a later session, representatives from Penn State, MIT, USC, and the University of Virginia discussed their use of Kaltura.) Kaltura can be downloaded and used by anyone for free, and it looks very powerful in comparison to the Ensemble Video system we’re currently using at Illinois.
Vimeo and Brightcove are also implementing HTML5, and I caught most of the Vimeo presentation. (We’re currently using Vimeo for some of our video hosting, since it’s very flexible and provides some great features like embedding, privacy settings, and HTML5 compatibility.) What struck me about the Vimeo guys is they are so young, yet they’re just building great tools on a continuing basis. All these companies’ systems are in perpetual Beta and it’s clear they’ll keep getting better…at least as long as they stay in business.
A side-note is appropriate here concerning the PBS COVE system. I talked with a number of public TV people at the OVC about COVE, and all hate it. Compared with other video publishing systems like Brightcove and Vimeo, COVE is a technical disaster. The administrative interface is confusing and difficult, the performance in a browser is terrible, and it’s not HTML5 compliant. I compared notes with the WGBH folks, who have also talked with people from other stations and we all see the same thing: GM’s love COVE because of the way it looks; the web staff who work with COVE all hate it because of the way it doesn’t perform. The PBS system has lots invested in COVE, and in my view that is a shame.
Hacking Public Domain Government Video - (2:30 PM - 3:00 PM)
Presenter: Abram Stern — UC Santa Cruz / Metavid.org
Abram Stern from UC Santa Cruz and Metavid.org presented on the joys and ridiculous difficulties of providing access to video archives of sessions and committee meetings from the U.S. Congress. Many parts of Congress produce their own streaming media archives, but each does it differently, e.g. in different formats, to a greater or lesser extent, etc., so the result is a mess. The metavid site (http://metavid.org/wiki/) attempts to bring order to the mess and make it searchable by topic. The site also makes it easier to locate specific sections within video archives by linking text transcripts to the video time code.
CSPAN has been providing lots of streaming archives since 1998, but these are mostly encoded in outdated formats like RealVideo. (Once a video is encoded to RealVideo, there is no good way to transcode it to a more useful format unless you have access to the original source files.)
The Sunlight Foundation is attempting to address this by capturing Congressional video and encoding it themselves. They are very ambitious. They plan to provide very deep search tools, including the ability to search video by phrase or keyword. They are working to implement the popcorn.js video player code which will enable linking specific video segments to related information and resources. Example: you’re watching a video archive of a Senator discussing the Affordable Care Act, and makes a partisan claim about a specific provision in the Act. The video can provide a link to that specific provision, so the viewer can actually read it. The text of the provision can easily be displayed next to the video, while it continues playing. That’s just one example of what’s possible by creating time-based links to related resources. You could also display how much money a given Senator received from oil companies when that Senator is speaking on energy policy. (During the Hack Lab on Sunday, met Noah Kunin, Multimedia Content Producer at the Sunlight Foundation, who is very interested in collaborating on any government media projects we might engage in, including how to best use the tools and resources they’re building.)
You can see an example video using popcorn.js on the WebMadeMovies site: http://webmademovies.etherworks.ca/popcorndemo/. As the video plays, the popcorn script displays captions, and the user can select different languages for the captions. Translation is accomplished on the fly using Google Translate. Next to the video window, we see a Google Map showing locations relevant to portions of the video as it plays. Another window displays related Wikipedia entries, and another window shows related items from Google News. There’s also a live Twitter feed showing search results based on topics as they are mentioned in the video. Crazy yes! It could get a lot more useful, since you can include semantics in the video stream linking to literally anything, and display it any way you want. Popcorn.js is supported by the Mozilla Foundation, and is in active development.
Introducing the Pan.do/ra HTML5 media archive - (3:00 PM - 3:15 PM)
Presenters:
Jan Geber
Sebastian Lütgert
Pan.do/ra is intended as an open media archive and tool set for annotating, editing, remixing, and curating online video, but it doesn’t quite exist yet. It is based on a tool that does exist, http://pad.ma. “PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.” Pad.ma is in turn built from Oxdb (http://0xdb.org/about), a pretty amazing open source tool for harvesting metadata about video, creating full-text search, and other utilities need to make video content findable and usable on the web. These tools make it possible to not only find a video, but to find a specific point in a video which you can then view, link to, add further annotation, analyze, cite, etc. The whole point of these tools is to facilitate collaborative production, distribution, annotation, and sharing, and making open video more useful for all concerned.
State of Media Accessibility Session - (3:15 PM - 3:45 PM)
Presenters:
Silvia Pfeiffer — Mozilla, xiph.org, WHATWG
Silvia Pfeiffer from Mozilla and xiph.org presented a short session outlining the problems in implementing accessibility features with audio and video in various browsers. And there are many problems, because each browser handles accessibility features in different ways. HTML5 should provide good solutions, but won’t until it’s implemented fully and consistently.
Implementing the Media Fragments URI Session - (3:45 PM - 4:15 PM)
Presenter: Raphael Troncy, EURECOMm W3C Media Fragments Group
The Media Fragments URI specification is currently being developed by the W3C Media Fragments Working Group. The group's mission is to create standard addressing schemes for media fragments on the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). “To make media a ‘first class citizen’ on the Web, it needs to be as easily linkable as HTML pages. Only when we are able to navigate through media resources based on semantics rather than random guesswork, will we really be able to master the full complexity of rich media.” So the spec would allow use of a URI fragment (anything behind a "#" in a URI) and a URI query (anything behind a "?" and before a "#" in a URI) to address subparts of a media resource, e.g. to play, link to, or annotate.
Example: http://www.example.com/example.ogv#t=10,20 would address the segment of the video file example.ogv occurring between 10 and 20 seconds into the video. So if you were writing about something that was said in this video, you could not only link to the video but the exact spot in the video in which the quotation occurs. This allows annotations and metadata to be added to specific segments within media files, which opens up many new possibilities for semantic links.
The W3C Media Fragments URI draft spec was published in June 2010, and is available here: http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/.
An Introduction to PBCore 2.0: Metadata for Public Broadcasters - (4:30 PM - 5:30 PM)
Presenters:
Chair: Nan Rubin — PBCore Project
Linda Tadic — Audiovisual Archive Network
David Rice — Audiovisual Preservation Solutions
Chris Beer — WGBH Interactive
Nan Rubin, Linda Tadic, Dave Rice, and Chris Beer gave a good primer describing the reason for the development of PBCore and its structure. The room was full, so it’s clear there is great of interest in PBCore. We’re doing a PBCore 2.0 panel at the AMIA Conference next month, where we’ll talk about how we are using PBCore, the tools we’ve created, and what PBCore brings to the table in terms of archival practice. There is lots of momentum in the PBCore 2.0 project and with the American Archive making use of it, we’ll see some solid examples of its utility.
The Opencast Matterhorn Project Session - (5:30 PM - 6:30 PM)
“The Opencast Matterhorn Project is an international cooperation of academic institutions to build an open source solution to manage academic video. Embedded in the Opencast Community, it is to meet the needs of universities with respect to lecture capture especially while at the same time providing a flexible solution for the wide range of academic requirements.”
Opencast provides a system for publishing, managing, and sharing video among groups of producers and users. The Matterhorn Project (http://www.opencastproject.org/) is more ambitious than Ensemble, and less than Kaltura. It offers simple, inexpensive dedicated capture hardware for classroom lectures including both video and VGA inputs (e.g. for capturing both the lecturer and a Powerpoint presentation), automated encoding (using ffmpeg) and uploading to streaming servers, and a management interface for adding metadata (based on Dublin Core), publishing, and managing access to video archives and assets. It also manages source video files, instead of leaving them at the mercy of whatever practices producers use (or don’t use). Matterhorn is also open source and in very active development. The roadmap includes adding captions, speech-to-text, and many other features. The Opencast Community is trying to serve as a focal point for open source projects beyond Matterhorn.
I went to two session where the same Matterhorn presentation was given. It looks like a nice system. One takeaway for me is the question How many open source video management systems and focal points for open source development do we really need? Are we diluting out collective resources? I don’t have a good answer, and I do think Matterhorn deserves a closer look at the University of Illinois, along with Kaltura.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Keynote: Mike Wesch - 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
Dr. Wesch is an anthropologist and professor at Kansas State University. If you haven’t already seen his video The Machine is Us/ing Us, stop reading this now and watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&feature=channel
Here’s another video he created with his class entitled A Vision of Students Today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o. This one is especially relevant to the discussion of instructional technology and the renovation of classrooms at the University of Illinois.
Wesch’s main point is that media changes the way we interact and thus changes our culture. Any profound change in media has a major effect on culture. Yet we are still teaching our students as if living in the 19th century. In an age of interactive media and anyone can create, we are still treating people like members of a passive audience. “We have to stop thinking about our schools (and I would add media channels) as information dumps,” Wesch says. “The best teachers are those who are learning alongside their students.” His method is what he terms “project-based learning”…with no syllabus, just a research project involving the entire class working collaboratively using Google Docs and whatever shareable tools and resources they find they need. He says we need to move from thinking about “information literacy” to “digital citizenship.”
To me this is very exciting. My takeaways: Applying this concept to journalism and storytelling, we as Illinois Public Media could think of ways to engage members of the “former audience” (Shirky) in the unfolding project of journalism and storytelling. Our job is no longer filling empty vessels with information, but engaging people in the shared project of understanding the world and making the best of our possibilities. Digital media now connects all of us in a global system, and it’s now both ubiquitous and personal. What can we do with that?
Open Video Innovation in Journalism session - (10:45 AM - 11:45 AM)
Emily Bell (chair) — Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia
Janine Gibson — Editor, guardian.co.uk
Nonny de la Pena — co-founder, Stroome (Knight News Challenge winner)
(There was a fourth panelist form the Huffington Post but I didn’t get her name)
Summary: Traditional media organizations no longer have a monopoly on the means of gathering and publishing media. How many cameras in the world are there anyway? More than there were a few years ago, to say the least. So we see the rise of “witness journalism” where non-professionals are essential sources of content. Of course this raises questions of credibility and responsibility, but the trend will not be stopped so we have to make the best of it.
Janine Gibson: When asked What is your digital strategy, her answer is “we ask our interns.” The Guardian is trying to open the door to more content contributed by readers etc. This has sometimes led to major breakthrough stories, like a piece of video that revealed corruption by an MP. Amateur video led to professional reporting by the Guardian. How do you get people to contribute? “The key bit is the asking.” But if we’re too afraid or risk-averse, we don’t ask…
Nonny de la Pena demonstrated Stroome (http://www.stroome.com/), a Knight-funded open source software tool allowing browser-based video editing, collaboration, and project management. These tools will only get better in the near future, and if traditional media organizations don’t use them to engage people, they’ll use them without us.
Tools for New Media Teaching and Learning - (12:00 PM - 1:15 PM)
Panelists:
Olaf Schulte - Opencast Matterhorn
Mark Phillipson/Schuyler Duveen - CCNMTL MediaThread
Peter Pinch - OpenVault (WGBH)
The highlight of this session was Schuyler Duveen demoing MediaThread, one of the coolest pieces of open source software I’ve seen for a while. MediaThread (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/portfolio/custom_software_applications_and_tools/mediathread.html) provides a browser-based collaboration space, and a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a bit of JavaScript that you literally drag into your browser toolbar. Then you visit a video site, like YouTube, Wikimedia Commons, the WGBH Open Vault site, and others, and when you see a video you’d like to annotate for whatever reason, you drag the bookmarklet onto the video. Suddenly you’re looking at the video in the MediaThread project site, where you can add notes and other metadata. You can play the video and select specific segments, then annotate those. You can then grab other videos from other sites and bring them into the project page. You can then share the project page with others. MediaThread becomes a simple way to add metadata to media, including specific sections of the frame.
I spoke with Schuyler during the Hack Lab on Sunday. It seemed obvious to me that one could use MediaThread as a user interface for building time-based links for use with popcorn.js, and he agreed. Both are open source projects, and it seems possible they could collaborate directly after discussions at the OVC.
Fostering Open Culture in Higher Education session - (2:45 PM - 3:30 PM)
Stanford University School of Medicine media folks struggled for years capturing classroom lectures on VHS videotape, which made it difficult to make the content actual usable. They recently built a media management system using Apple products including Final Cut Server and Podcast Producer, along with lots of custom code. They also worked with the Stanford Legal department to develop rights policies, including the use of Creative Commons licenses for classroom lectures etc. They built an interface for uploading and cataloging media content, including options for selecting different rights expressions. They got buy-in from the administration and the faculty, and they say it’s going very well now. Classroom lectures are actually accessible for the first time. A very nice presentation and a good success story.
Educational Video Service Strategy - (3:45 PM - 4:45 PM)
Panelists: Chris Millet, Manager of Educational Technology (Penn State)
Steven Gass, Associate Director for Public Services (MIT)
Wendy M. Chapman, Director of Web Technologies, Facilities and Technology (USC)
Jama Coartney, Head of the Digital Media Lab (University of Virginia).
All have now adopted Kaltura as a video management system, and pretty much raved about it. Didn’t get into technical details, but discussed how they are moving pretty quickly to create and publish lots and lots of educational media content. MIT has revamped their Open Courseware project using Kaltura.
New Models for Production: In Conversation with Sally Potter - (4:45 PM - 5:30 PM)
Presenters:
Dr. Eric Faden — Bucknell University
Clare Holden — Adventure Pictures/SP-ARK
Peter Kaufman — Intelligent Television
Sally Potter — auteur (via Skype)
Filmmaker Sally Potter and her associate Clare Holden demonstrated SP-ARK (http://www.sp-ark.org/), an open source video archiving system allowing detailed annotation of films and related materials (scripts, call sheets, etc). To me this is yet another example of an “information environment” providing an entry point into a universe of related data and content.
Peter Kaufman spoke of building new partnerships among filmmakers, new media news organizations, archivists, and open source developers, and with established corporate media entities who after all have a great deal of interest in media access and preservation.
Dr. Eric Faden spoke about the challenges in teaching today’s college students about media. He makes students produce videos instead of writing papers, and while some of them take to it, others hate it. He told of one student who struggled with it but graduated, then got a job with an insurance company. Her company needed someone to produce a video about a new product for discussion at a corporate meeting, and she was able to do it. He says video production skills are increasingly in demand in a growing number of professional environments. “We need to teach not just media literacy,“ he says, “but media competence. They have to be able to actually make things.”
The Medium of Record: The Daily Show's Adam Chodikoff - (5:30 PM - 6:15 PM)
Adam Chodikoff is the guy who finds all the archival video clips for Jon Stewart. Like the interview where Dick Cheney says he never claimed there was a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and then we see a clip of another Cheney interview where he makes exactly that claim. Adam Chodikoff played a number of segments from The Daily Show so that was fun. I asked him later if they ever have to license content for use on the show, and if they ever got complaints from rights-holders. He told me he doesn’t know about that stuff, as it’s “above my pay-grade.” One interesting thing I learned is that Jon Stewart comes up with many of the ideas that make it onto the show. They have a team of writers, but Jon is deeply involved every day.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
“Hack Day” was a very informal day of hands-on work at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. I was able to attend for about three hours before heading to the airport for the trip home. I spent most of this time working with about a dozen other people to implement popcorn.js for a sample video. We almost got it done before I had to leave, and of course I brought back all the code. The scene in this space at NYU was astonishing. On a Sunday afternoon, there were about 120 people crammed into the forth floor of this building on Broadway, all hammering out software projects of one kind or another. Several projects were being personally guided by Ben Moskowitz, who works for Mozilla and is the main organizer of the OVC. Many of the people working in the popcorn.js session were filmmakers and archive managers, not programmers. More to say about popcorn.js but I’ll save that for my team. Hack Day at OVC was a fantastic model of how to leverage the expertise of programmers to educate non-programmers on the use of open source software and methods, and facilitate use of these new tools among a global community.
Summary Thoughts
Systems and tools are rapidly being built to make best use of “open source, open standards, open formats, and open access.” Mozilla is trying to foster a sense of community among those engaged in various projects, and it’s not just about technology but also “open culture,” digital citizenship, and news ways of thinking about media, education, and community. Yet most of us are so focused on our own projects that we don’t see the potential intersections of our work with others. If we intend to move forward in media, education, and technology, we must collaborate.
Categories: media • metadata • technology
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
I’m finding it impossible to conjure up a quick summary that does justice here. Let’s see: “The Open Video Conference, held at the NYU Law School on June 19th and 20th, has come and gone like a tsunami, reflecting vast currents of change washing over all human media endeavors, sweeping away previous conceptions and technologies, and leaving a trail of broken business models like so much detritus on the beach.”
That doesn’t quite do it, so I’ll throw out some bits that seem most important:
- The inaugural OVC drew some 840 people from around the world. I hung out with amazing people from Amsterdam, Finland, Australia, Asia, Brazil, and the U.S.: filmmakers, funders, hackers, CEOs of technology firms, metadata geeks, scholars, journalists, activists, you name it. Video has become central to our political, cultural, and social lives, and now everyone has a stake in open video…like free speech.
- Creative Commons licensing has remained somewhat niche and cool, but it may be about to go mainstream because it works for open video, and the CC people really have their legal, technical, and marketing act together.
- The words “open video” may convey different meanings to different minds. A few key things I see: Technically, there are now no real barriers to anyone who wants to access anything. If video is on the internet, it’s open video. And if it’s not on the internet it will be soon. That’s either a problem or an opportunity according to your point of view, or maybe both.
- For most but not all people at the OVC, open video means access to a larger view of the world and the people in it, and is a very good thing. Attempts to control that by DRM or teams of copyright lawyers will fail, and only cause misery along the way.
- Video companies like YouTube, Blip.tv, and Boxee are embracing open video, with the possible exception of YouTube.
- Ogg vorbis and theora are ascendant, as they are becoming more mature and are increasingly embraced by the big players (see point 5 above).
- HTML5 is a Really Big Deal for open video and media in general. It was a total gas witnessing lead developers for Webkit, Mozilla, GStreamer, and VLC brainstorm HTML5 browser support with a room full of media geeks and coders.
- Documentary filmmakers need support more than ever, as the “traditional” sources of funding are basically gone. We need to figure out new “traditional” sources, and I suspect this has to do with social media and the power law.
- Many, many smart people are attempting to solve the problem of digital media workflow, cataloging, publishing, archiving, and sharing in social media environments. Most of them have some very similar ideas and approaches. All of us seem to be getting closer to actually making digital media work. Standards, formats, and practices are beginning to make sense, and the ones that work will not be proprietary. They will be Open.
- We won’t know where this is going for at least another five years. That’s my analysis so don’t blame the OVC for this “insight.” It’s in incredibly exciting time to be in the middle of the media future.
Categories: media • technology
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
We seek to solve online media publishing, cataloging, accessibility, findability, and preservation in one simple interface. Open source, open standards, modular architecture...this thing would solve common problems faced by public, educational, and community media.
What follows is the current draft of a white paper making the rounds at the University of Illinois, authored by me and the other members of the Illinois Multimedia Steering Group.
Whitepaper V2
Authors: Drew MacGregor, Brian McNurlen, Colleen Cook, Jack Brighton, Professor Bill Hammack
TIME: The Illinois Media Engine
(Intended audience: Illinois administrators, faculty, IT professionals)
The Illinois Multimedia Steering Group (MSG) is a cross-disciplinary user community dedicated to enhancing rich media at Illinois. Since early 2008 we have been developing a vision for media at Illinois, recently partnering with Professor Bill Hammack. This is version 2.0 of our whitepaper, with further revisions to follow.
The state of rich media at Illinois is currently in great disarray. While pockets of excellence exist at unit levels, Illinois lacks a campus-wide vision or strategy, precluding us from being leaders in this rapidly growing field. The key to maintaining and extending the University's reputation for academic excellence lies in offering a global audience the core of the university: The minds and thoughts of our faculty and students. Increasingly, the global audience is reached through online rich media. To become effective we must move from "individual heroics" to coordinated planning on a large scale.
In all three facets of the University- research, teaching, engagement- most indicators would show us lagging behind our peers in digital media. We are not effectively promoting our leading scholarship and works of engagement with video. We have no central facility for producing instructional media, as many of our peers do. Our website, now one of our most important marketing tools, does little to connect viewers to rich media content. Using the benchmark peer analysis outlined in the strategic plan, we are clearly falling short of these goals. The University of Illinois aspires to be the preeminent land-grant institution in the country, yet our use of rich media compares poorly with our CIC peers.
Examples from our peer institutions abound:
• MIT physics professor Walter Lewin provides lectures free online. A 17-year old from India wrote "Through your inspiring video lectures I have managed to see just how beautiful physics is, both astounding and simple."
• The YouTube sensation "The Large Hadron Rap" accurately conveys knowledge related to particle physics and the supercollider in the form of a “physics rap” - and has gathered millions of views.
• Harvard has launched bigthink.com, featuring their greatest minds talking about the problems of the day in short, well-produced video segments.
• In September 2008, the Stanford School of Engineering launched "Stanford Engineering Everywhere" (SEE), a service providing introductory Engineering courses for free online. The intent is to form virtual communities around the Creative Commons license with Stanford education at the core. The SEE initiative touches on several areas addressed in the 2008 Horizon report: Grassroots video; collaborative webs, collective intelligence; and social operating systems.
To remain competitive the University of Illinois needs to establish a rich and deep multimedia website to reach global audiences. Such a presence is now essential to attract students, faculty and the support of the public. The MSG believes that an Illinois vision of online education can extend and surpass existing models by leveraging our areas of excellence in a new digital media initiative. Illinois is renown as the institution that developed sound-on-film, plasma display technology, the transistor, public broadcasting, the LED, the first graphical web browser (Mosaic), and PayPal and YouTube through our alumni. But until now, we have abdicated our leadership position in rich media to peer and lesser institutions.
While it must be acknowledged that we are behind, the MSG believes Illinois has an opportunity to surpass existing models of rich media in higher education. We have an opportunity to innovate and lead by developing a new kind of content-rich web multimedia presence - a Web 2.0 new media service built on open standards and best practices in engagement, accessibility, library science, and engineering. Each of these areas has long been strength at Illinois. They are all coming together online, at a moment when students, faculty, alumni, and a growing global audience for rich media are looking for leadership and innovation. They are looking not only to connect with and consume media, but to interact with, create, and share content through emerging social media networks and practices.
Ronald Burt, in the "The Social Origin of Good Ideas", studied how good ideas grew in corporations; he observed that managers who "bridged", that is, knew what happened in other sections of their company excelled in useful idea creation. Here a social aspect applies: Those that observed the other sections through social contact could see the "holes" and thus bring forward powerful new ideas. Campus-wide Web 2.0 video sharing and other social networks provide the ability to bridge and see these holes. This is critical in our 21st century paradigm of cross-disciplinary research and teaching.
The Illinois Media engine
The "traditional" approach would call for media and IT at Illinois to determine new workflows and try to centralize servers as best we can. However, this strategy reinforces the flawed premise that solutions can be determined solely via IT modeling. This sort of incremental change fails to change the community mindset, nor does it set Illinois apart as an innovator. Simply using the web to deliver video instead of via television doesn't make for new media. The latter requires three essential elements: a) an architecture of participation, e.g. the ability for the public to sort and rate it; b) the ability of any person at the University of Illinois to create and upload content, and c) a "long tail" - essentially an infinite digital archive.
We call for a 2-3 year open-source software development project that will set the University of Illinois apart as an innovator in the area of media distribution and online collaboration, and position us to massively grow our use of rich media for education, research, and outreach. We envision TIME: The Illinois/Internet Media Engine. For lack of a better description, TIME is partly a "YouTube for Illinois", in that we have a common database of media assets and a central front end tied to a distributed network of servers. However, the media engine goes far beyond the capabilities of YouTube, allowing a greater suite of tools to audiences and content creators. Ideally this engine would contain video of every seminar given on campus, every conference held at the University, a three-minute video of every faculty member and thought creator, every art performance. The real power of this medium resides, however, in the users. The key to a successful long tail lies in uploading a huge amount of content fitted with social bookmarks and folksonomic tagging that allow users to rate, comment and forward video. A user of the site should be able to easily search for content, browse by subject or department, sort by rating, length, and so on, and to rate and comment on videos. Additionally the videos should be easily downloadable to an iPod or other handheld device.
Tools would be modular, added, and enhanced as development time exists. The tools might include:
• Simple uploading of media content ala YouTube, but with much higher quality;
• The ability to add library-grade cataloging information (metadata) based on open standards and best practices;
• User tagging of media assets (folksonomy), tied to an individual account, allowing a student to create personal bookmarks of lecture content for later review;
• Granular authentication schemes for faculty to protect content;
• The ability to create a playlist or curriculum from a database of assets created by a user, or shared by other users, for example linking various micro-lectures to video blogs and podcasts;
• Student-created content as part of a publicly-accessible workflow;
• Commenting, annotating, and tagging specific points of a lecture to allow threaded discussions within a media asset;
• Management tools that let the creator determine how long content remains "live", if it can be downloaded, or tagged, all from one interface;
• Hooks for captioning and transcripts to allow greater searchability into the media assets, and accessibility for all users regardless of perceptual abilities or impairments;
• A repository for all source media files, so they can be digitally archived and reformatted as technologies advance, preserving access to these vital resources for generations to come.
At this time we find no tools available to provide this level of control over assets, audience control, accessibility, and intellectual property. Several departments have looked at commercial products to serve micro-lectures, but they primarily offer only a video server. The content must still be embedded in local web pages on an ad hoc basis. We propose a project using the web content framework Drupal as the development component, allowing us to share the fruits of our efforts with the larger academic community.
We envision four main areas of concentration related to rich media and the concept of a common media framework: Content Creation; Accessibility and Standards; Distribution; and Archiving and Preservation.
Content Creation
It is difficult to briefly summarize content creation because it takes so many forms. It ranges from cell phone-created content, to screencasts on a desktop, to lecture recordings, to high-end video productions. Each level of creation has its merits and cannot replace another. For example, the quality of content for a short student project need not be the same as an interview with a distinguished researcher. High-end content production can take between 2 and 50 hours per one hour of recorded content.
While the methods of creation differ, they all represent the University of Illinois and deserve to be considered as such. Currently we lack the ability to do much high-end creation because of a lack of resources, studios, and professional staff. As a result we have a large amount of user-created content that goes unsupported.
In addition to TIME, we propose a Virtual Center of Excellence for rich media creation, centered on the IT media community. This proposal would require all members of the virtual center to give 4 hours per week to media projects related to the campus. These hours might be spent giving workshops, creating tutorials, or assisting other media professionals as needed. Further, we posit the idea of formal subject-matter experts who are on call to units to act as a sounding board in their field. ACES has great expertise with field shoots, ATLAS with creating learning objects, WILL with broadcast-style productions and documentaries, and Computer Science with classroom capture.
These are steps that the MSG will take on our own without University involvement. However, if the growth of new media is important to the University, we must begin to treat it as such. Somehow we must find a way to subsidize media development to a greater degree. Cost-recovery models do not scale for rich media. Students tell us that podcasts and lecture capture are extremely important, thus we should fund it through student fees. Lastly, we must recognize that rich media is more than a recording of an event, it is a tool that can lead to learning outcomes.
If we begin to look at a distinguished lecture less as an event we record because others do it, and instead design it with specific learning objectives and audiences in mind we will begin to see new opportunities for learning communities. If we can educate professors that a 3-minute interview on their research can lead to greater media exposure, our faculty may embrace this medium with more enthusiasm. If we stop selling the idea of lecture-capture as a way to replace lectures, and instead focus on the ways students learn, our faculty and students might interact better.
A long-term goal might be to standardize on a single lecture capture system, but that requires capital and political buy-in. Instead if we can develop a physical center of excellence for new media, a media sandbox, we can spend time with faculty teaching them how to create better content on their own. This concept allows for greater scaling of content, and allows more users to create content for the media engine we propose.
Content creation can be easy; anyone with a camera can do it. Content creation is also hard when we talk about large-scale and high-end content creation. We want to make it easy for users to create and publish their content. We want to make it hard for our peers to copy our vision for rich media.
Accessibility and Standards
In 2008 the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA) went into effect in the state of Illinois. The act requires captioning, transcripts, and alternate accessibility options on digital media to those with learning disabilities and audiences with visual and hearing impairments. Beyond compliance with the law, adherence to the specifications of the act creates a better learning experience for all users by making the content more searchable and accessible for all concerned.
Research into a viable transcription solution by our community and CITES has led to packages that do not scale in our large environment. With the reality that an investment in development funds may be less costly than an IITAA lawsuit and accompanying bad press, we encourage the University of Illinois system of campuses to fund a program the develop a scalable solution useful to all State organizations that produce rich media. The funding of such a project would result in reduced costs to other educational and government institutions that are struggling with the same accessibility challenges.
The University of Illinois features some of the top accessibility experts in the world. By creating an environment where they can develop a software solution or partner with a software development firm to create a scalable solution, the University will maintain leadership in accessibility, better serve all users of our content, and benefit the State of Illinois directly.
Ideally the transcription process would be open source and independent of format in order to create a modular solution to fit the many models of media creation. The output of the process could then be plugged into the larger media distribution model we propose. This is a significant problem, and one that major software firms have yet to solve. One short-term option might be to encourage greater service/learning time by giving students service credit for contributing to transcripts of content. Long-term we need to realize we have an opportunity that requires capital.
Distribution
Just as the 2008 Horizon report highlighted emerging technology related to new media, the 2009 report presents opportunities that play to the strengths of Illinois. In the area of Cloud Computing, Illinois researchers are at the forefront of networked systems.
Currently the distribution of media content at Illinois is compartmentalized, with units deploying media servers and multiple front-end publishing points. Finding multimedia content on the Illinois web is an exercise in frustration, even for advanced users. In 2007 the MSG deployed a product called Ensemble to create a common publishing point, and to allow audiences to locate media in an easy, searchable manner. This solution works within our current model, but isn't an effective solution for growth, nor does it address fundamental issues related to accessibility. Consolidating servers is an IT approach to the problem. We must address the systemic issues related to how our audiences find, use, annotate, and share content.
Development of a media distribution model for Illinois should follow two tracks. First, we must develop a 2-3 year plan to centralize media servers to either Centers of Excellence or within Central IT. These servers would be standards-based, not relying on proprietary systems and expensive cost models. Further we must stop limiting our servers to "instruction" or "administration" and open these servers to address all of our areas of service and engagement. No matter the eventual model for IT at Illinois, greater coordination of servers tied to a common file service is critical to growth and stability. Maintaining the current paradigm of many small servers will preclude growth of media use to smaller units, thus driving faculty to post their content to external sites where they will be forced to forfeit some of their intellectual rights. Such an ad hoc approach is both wasteful of university resources, and ultimately unsustainable. We must build a solution that will gracefully scale, and provide for the preservation of valuable media assets.
Second, we must develop a front-end for all media at Illinois. Whether units buy into a central server model or create proprietary content, audiences need a single access point to search for media at Illinois. Ensemble works for this now, but licensing prevents large-scale use for departmental use, let alone student-created content. Our concept for TIME would permit all content to be found within one common front end. The front-end development would create the following opportunities that do not currently exist:
• Departments could create micro-lectures of 5 minutes and manage them within the common media framework. Rather than have to rely on a server admin to move data and create links, the content manager front-end would provide faculty members control over which learning objects were presented to students at any given time. Further, a professor could also share knowledge on a subject to colleagues in other departments or other Universities, because we would be able to provide them with control of their own academic content. This is currently an area of interest for the College of Business.
• Channels could be developed to target audiences such as alumni groups. Playlists could be created using a common interface for all users, with multiple link points managed by a central database.
• Researchers at institutes such as the Information Trust Institute or the Advanced Digital Sciences center could pool their media content with other departments and groups to create large-scale online learning centers. Imagine a channel unique to an Illinois media database where lectures from the Siebel Center could be combined with a researcher's video blog, a live conference from Singapore, and a guest lecture at the Beckman institute. Right now we have to email a lot of links around; in a new model we treat media assets as learning objects.
• The concept doesn't preclude the use of YouTube, iTunes U or other networks, as they play an important role for many audiences. The idea is that all Illinois content could be shared, branded, and hosted here while maintaining intellectual control. It could also be uploaded and shared with other hosting systems with greater efficiency than by simply using their usual interfaces.
• The common media engine would position Illinois with the ability to create multiple cross-disciplinary learning centers that would make the SEE program seem limited in scope.
• A common media distribution system would permit granular access control, allowing specific content creators to post directly to a site, change access permissions from public to password protected, or allow for download to mobile devices.
• We also need to be flexible in our planning to allow the next generation of online tools to blend with whatever we design now.
• Well-considered planning could engage other media beyond audio and video, opening TIME to be extensible to images, blogs, and other user content…truly adding the "multi" to the media.
In both the networked server and media framework development tracks, the collaboration of multiple disciplines and units would be required. The scope of the collaboration is daunting and potentially massive, with researchers acting as focus groups and IT and media professionals interacting as subject experts. We do not minimize the scale of what we propose; rather we see it as an opportunity to engage in a common campus objective that leverages the strengths of our faculty, our departmental expertise, and both central and decentralized IT staff.
The 2008 and 2009 Horizon reports both reference Mash Ups and the Personal Web as emerging technologies and trends. The old model of posting a media asset and links to servers doesn't work for new web users. To be relevant and speak to our audiences we must be more user-centric and make the content mobile and interactive. New communication tools get socially interesting when they get technologically boring - for young people today the new social tools are passing beyond normal and heading to ubiquitous with invisible coming soon. The University must have a meaningful presence in Web 2.0 before invisible fully arrives, otherwise our use of the medium will appear ham-handed and graceless.
Archiving and Preservation
A critical component to the University and the future of digital media is the question of how we handle archiving and preservation. We have the top research library and Graduate School of Library & Information Sciences, but we have yet to develop a model of collaboration between media producers and our archives. Further, we lack a common cataloging framework to share information across units.
We propose to change this as well in this concept of TIME. First, we must move toward a standard metadata standard such as PBCore, a standard rapidly being adopted in the moving image archival profession. Second, we must engage the University Archives on methods for archiving content in the near and long term. We often hear that it's a shame we don't have recordings of renowned Classical Studies Professor Scanlon, but we ignore the current notable faculty we aren't capturing for future generations. Third, the Library must be a key stakeholder in the common media framework we propose. Rather than asking the archivists to work on a separate system, we must ensure that all assets and meta-information can be exported to the library system so as to eliminate the hurdles we face today. Further, we need the information sciences professionals to have a say in the user interface. In this way we will move toward a model where rich media/IT/and the library are all on the same database.
Right now we lack archiving of most of our department-created content. To get it into the archive is another process outside our workflows. Many of us don't even know what should be archived. An integrated media database and framework would enable the stakeholders to better share and preserve what will someday be priceless as our rich digital heritage. It is also an opportunity for Illinois to lead.
Emerging Opportunities
Two significant educational and research opportunities emerge from the concept of TIME. First, the development of the engine would create a "trusted learning engine" for K-12 educators in the State of Illinois. Educational models created by professors and top students would be made available to schools. Teachers would be able to create learning objects for their students by logging in and selecting media by defined criteria (highest ranking, "top creator status", subject categories, user tagging, etc). Currently a teacher must seek out and filter YouTube content or locate it on TeacherTube.com. TIME would provide them with a trusted resource based on Illinois research and teaching.
The creation of TIME would also create new research opportunities for Illinois faculty by providing data that is currently unavailable or segmented. The possibility to study how users interact with each other socially while at the same time gathering quantifiable statistics about the engine would benefit multiple fields. These research specialties might discover new interconnections through the collected data. Server logs and hard data would benefit these groups, among others:
• Data mining researchers;
• Server and multimedia Quality of Service research;
• Networking and system design engineers;
• Educators investigating the effectiveness of learning objects and/or new media on age groups;
• Library and Information Science researchers investigating folksonomy, user tagging, and archiving on a large scale;
• Sociologists and communications researchers interested in seeing how social networking interacts with education.
TIME can benefit Illinois by engaging students and educators, while opening new researching avenues made possible by the dataset it generates.
Summary
If we are to be the preeminent Land Grant University, we must take initiative and lead by example. We are already far behind our peers in terms of rich media systems; incremental change will not set us apart. Instead we propose our vision for a software development project to create the Illinois Media Engine.
Our proposed project has the potential to bring the community closer together with a common goal. It will require us to collaborate in new ways, while checking our individual agendas at the door. It will lead to growth stature, resources, and opportunities as we enable faculty and students to take ownership of their own media creations. It will set us apart as a visionary leader in the future of education. It is not an easy proposal, but only a bold call to action will move us beyond merely keeping up with our peers. To be blunt, we propose a "moon shot", a project to engage the campus to work together on something we cannot create individually.
This 2-3 years-long software project will require server resources, programmers, and a project manager. It will also require subject-matter experts to contribute their time to the project as advisors. It will require IT media staff and the Library to act as both consultants and clients.
In this time of shrinking budgets we know a proposal like this will be met with skepticism. We believe there are opportunities for funding from outside sources, alumni donors, and seed money. If we fail to work toward a large goal, our media creation will continue to be fragmented and differently branded. Change in the area of media at Illinois must happen, and if it is important that we speak to audiences in the new media world, we need to make it happen. Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Michigan and others are reaching out to underserved audiences through their online media efforts. Viewers in the developing world can now view micro lectures from experts in a variety of disciplines. Why not Illinois? Rather than comparing ourselves to these institutions, what if Illinois were to be the standard by which others choose to measure themselves?
We hear a great deal about Cyberinfrastructure; what better way to stake our claim to the future than to share a media engine designed by top researchers with the rest of the world. Beyond dissemination of our knowledge through rich media, Illinois will position itself as the innovator of future knowledge distribution. Imagine the Illinois Media Engine providing all public schools in Illinois a secure space to upload and preserve student created content into the future. What if TIME enabled us to combine University of Illinois media with other state agencies to provide true public education in a trusted learning environment?
We invite the campus administration, faculty, and IT professionals to endorse this concept and assist us in creating a development team to implement the Illinois Media Engine.
Categories: media • technology
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Decided to tackle cataloging several GB of photos taken with various cameras, dates, and locations, relating to many subjects. How to do this? Let's experiment with tools and techniques, and see what we find most useful and interesting.
This is the starting point of the photo gallery (Mootools script in ExpressionEngine)
This uses the EE Gallery module. You can add descriptions of each photo, and add description fields as needed, but it's still a bit goofy to me. I want to try creating a normal EE blog as a photoblog, with all the attendant built-in great EE weblog stuff. Or in 2.0 as I hear it's channels not blogs...
BTW, the primary aim with the blog photo project is is publish many photos on the blog. The secondary aim is to ask: What does it mean to publish photos on the blog? And: How cool can it be?
Categories: media • personal • technology
Saturday, June 21, 2008
I really liked RealVideo, OK? For years it just worked, had SureStream going for it, and a great server product in Helix. Alas, many people got sick and tired of dealing with Real Player for a variety of well-known reasons. So the player install base dropped and well, it became obvious that the Real format was in demise. With YouTube and most other media sites deploying Flash video, and with a Flash install base of something like 98%, the choice was clear.
But I soon discovered that delivering Flash video wasn't totally simple. For one thing, Macromedia gives you great tools to create the elements for publishing Flash video on websites. Just walk thru the steps, upload the files and code, and you're done right? And then your web pages don't validate.
So I spent some time looking for best practices for publishing Flash video, for those of us who care about web standards which should be all of us. But that's another harangue. This here is a recipe for publishing Flash video using valid code and open source elements.
Code Issues
There are several methods for putting Flash video on your site. They all require:
- some html code in an object tag
- a Flash player which is your SWF file
- the Flash video file which is the FLV file
The official Adobe method uses both an object tag and an embed tag. The Adobe method works fine but, um, actually there is no embed tag in any version of html or xhtml. The embed tag simply isn't valid code. Should we care? Can we do better? The answer to both questions, for the sake of future compatibility when browsers become actually standards-compliant, is Yes!
Also, the Adobe code works great if Flash is installed, but if not it won't issue a prompt to install. Users may just see something ugly and broken.
A better method was published as an article on A List Apart called Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards. This code validates but it has a number of other drawbacks, and may actually be less accessible to screen readers.
The better-yet solution was developed by Geoff Stearns, a Flash engineer at YouTube. It's called SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script, and you can read all the details here.
The basic idea is you use a JavaScript file to assist the browser. You specify a few variables and parameters like the video file location, player window size, autostart, player color, etc., in the call to the script. The script then generates a new object containing the player, feeds the .flv video file into it, and everything gets rendered on your web page. Geoff has made everything you need (SWFObject JavaScript file, code examples, instructions, and examples) freely available on the SWFObject site. Sweet!
Cutting to the Chase
Here's an actual code example based on SWFObject:
Notice the curly brackets enclosing the word "title." This should be the filename of your Flash video, and it also serves to connect that video file to this specific instance of the Flash player/object. So you can have any number of Flash player/objects on one web page, and the JavaScript connects the right video files to the right player windows. (Don't use the curly brackets; they're merely a placeholder in this example.) It also frees you to use a CMS to automatically generate any number of player/objects dynamically. You can see an example of this on this here site I designed.
The parameters in the object tag control the size, color, and behavior of the Flash player (the .swf file). You have many options, which you can read in exhaustive detail on the Adobe site.
So you use this code, along with the SWFObject JavaScript file, to control the player. Put the JavaScript file somewhere on your web server, link to it in the head section of your web page, and you have a solid Flash video foundation that actually validates.
Open Source Flash Players
But you still need a Flash player, which is your .swf file. You can build one yourself using Adobe Flash CS3 or something. You can buy one from several sources, which might include features like automatic user bandwidth detection, etc. Or you can use the outstanding free open source JW Flash video player provided by Jeroen Wijering. (Jeroen has lots of other helpful guidance and resources on his site.)
The JW Flash Player can also stream mp3 audio files. You can also control it with an XML playlist. I also set it up to be fed videos via clickable thumbnail images, and I'll write that up sometime soon. You'll recognize this player all over the freakin' Internet because it's free, it works, and it's good.
However, if you want a small Flash audio player with a different look, here's a nice one created by Mindy McAdams. You'll need her JavaScript file as well, which she provides freely with the player, along with full instructions for using and customizing everything.
You can see many examples of this player on one of my sites. It validates, and works flawlessly with my CMS feeding it unique mp3 filenames to create new player instances on the fly.
A Flash Media Future?
Will Flash be the default online media format in the years ahead? Hard to know, but it appears dominant for the moment. My approach now is to offer Flash video and audio for streaming, and mpeg4 video and mp3 audio for downloads wherever possible. I'm currently in the business of publishing about 40 hours of news, interviews, and other audio content every week, and I manage other sites containing hundreds of hours of video. It's all done with a CMS, and using the simple, valid, and open source Flash tools described above. Good luck with your projects!
Categories: media • technology