multimedia & flash wrappers
Chacha
I'm Chach. Right now, I'm working on a rich-media theme for a UC
Berkeley project. One of the elements we are looking to develop for
our theme are treatments for multimedia & flash interactives.
Here's a summary of where we're at...still have a bit further to go in
thinking about this. We're interested in talking with others who might
want similar function.
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People can upload flv files using the dropbox or contributor plugin.
Omeka will recognize that file format (Dave mentioned having the
plugin recognize the mime-type.) So basically an flv or swf file
(interactive, not a flash wrapper) could be uploaded to the archive.
Perhaps some of the information associated with the flv would
automatically fill in the item metadata fields. For our project, that
aspect isn't as important.
More important is this: when people doing content creation are
setting up pages, they should be able to choose from a variety of page
layouts that work with different kinds of players. (This I already was
able to make, it was very easy.) I had no problem using the JWPlayer
to set up a page layout that worked if you typed in the name of an flv
file in a text field.
But it would be WAY better to be able to drag an item from the archive
into the page layout, and make it collect that information for the flv
file location. I'm not yet sure how to get Omeka to do this.
I thought, too, about making a set of page layouts that take pictures
or multimedia.
Maybe this would work as when you upload an item to the archive, you
click buttons about which player you want it to use. Seems like you
wouldn't want the player CODE in the page layout...you would just want
the flash wrapper in the page layout, because then you would have the
presentation layer separate from the code.
It would also be really good to have a multimedia item type be able to
reference multiple formats of the same exact multimedia. For example,
super-accessible video could contain references to an HD version,
regular flv, quicktime, mp4. The idea is that the video degrades
really well -- if you view the content on an iPhone, you can see the
mp4 or quicktime instead of the flash.
I noticed that it is really really easy to paste embed code for
youTube. It would be nice to make that embed code an item in the
archive.
So as for plugins, I'm not sure what the plugin would be
exactly....it's probably a few little plugins - such as one that
recognizes the flv file, and another that makes an item for the
archive that extends the 'moving image' item?
Any ideas?
-Chach
Kris Kelly
would be useful for Omeka. The next version of Omeka is being
designed so that plugins will be able to hook in to the way that files
are displayed. The advantage for this is that a plugin could define a
flash wrapper to display an FLV file, or any arbitrary HTML to display
a certain type of file, so you wouldn't have to create new layouts for
each type of file. Basically, if you had a gallery of items in an
exhibit, Omeka would automatically display all the files in the way
that was defined externally, so that the images would be <img /> tags,
FLV files could be in an <object> wrapper or whatever you defined,
etc. Does that seem like something that would help out with what
you're doing?
Also, with regards to having multiple video formats available,
something that you can do in the current version of Omeka is write a
plugin that will act on every file that gets uploaded. You could use
your plugin to create new subdirectories in the Omeka archive/
directory, probably one per video format, so you could have an 'mp4'
directory or something like that where you would store all the mp4-
encoded copies of your Omeka files. There is an 'after_file_upload'
plugin hook that you could use to encode the uploaded file into all of
these other formats, which you would then store in the respective
directories. Then you could write a helper function that displays the
movies on your theme. This function might also check to see if
someone was viewing Omeka on an iPhone, and if so, it would display
the quicktime version of the file instead of the normal version. That
way, you wouldn't have to upload 4 different versions of the file to
Omeka each time.
Kris
Mark A. Matienzo
I'm at the New York Public Library and we're looking to do the same
sort of things with Flash - both the ability to serve AV media with a
Flash wrapper and to incorporate existing interactive flash movies and
applications into exhibits. We'd love to help out. Kris mentioned
object wrappers - this model is used already by the PdfMeNot and
iPaper plugins that are in the Omeka Subversion repository.
Down the line another idea would be to use something like xmoov-php
[1] to provide HTTP pseudostreaming to improve performance.
Hammering out a first draft of a flash embedder shouldn't be too
difficult - I may post my results within the next few days.
Mark Matienzo
Applications Developer, The New York Public Library
[1] http://xmoov.com/xmoov-php/