Anybody use Kaltura? Any interest?

[eth...@ucsc.edu]

Hello all!
I am writing some Omeka plugins, and one of the needs I am trying to address is video management. UCSC occasionally uses Kaltura, a proprietary online video server / management tool with editing capabilities and such. There has been some talk of having me write a Kaltura plugin for Omeka, but folks here aren't sure it would actually be used much because Kaltura is proprietary (and, frankly, does not seem to be very popular even among the people here who have a license).

Any input from the intrepid Omeka developers here? Does any of you work with an institution with a Kaltura license? Do you think folks would be interested in using Kaltura with Omeka? Weigh in if you're interested!

Best,

Ned

[nancy moussa]

Hi

That should be interesting. 

University of michigan using kaltura and I should integrated with omeka 2.0 I was able to do it with omeka 1.5 but not yet 2.

But I did not made a plugin, I use the multiracial API to access the video and display it in my theme. After a user create an item and submit some information about the video like id, I use that info to display the video. I am not sure what you are looking for in ur plugin? I did not feel that I need to create a plugin for that though it might be interest if there is a need.

Nancy

Sent from my iPhone

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[eth...@ucsc.edu]

Hi Nancy! Thanks for the input.

At UCSC we also use use Kaltura to embed video content in an Omeka 1.5 site (the Grateful Dead Archive Online) by customizing our theme code. This works fine, but when the developer who set it up quit the non-coders found it difficult to maintain the theme code and to replicate its functionality on other Omeka instances. The benefit of putting the kaltura code in a plugin is that it could be installed easily on different themes by people who don't code much.

However, at this point it looks like we're probably going to move away from Kaltura and set up our own streaming server. This will give us more flexibility, lower costs (kaltura is kind of pricey), and hopefully will make our code useful to more people who aren't using the Kaltura service.

Best!

[Kevin S. Clarke]

You probably saw the other recent email on this topic but, in case not, if you all are looking to replace Kaltura you might think about Avalon.  The recent email on the list about an Omeka plugin for it says:

"This plugin allows you to use the link found on an Avalon site for a video or audio file and embed that in an iFrame in an Omeka item to stream a video or audio file from Avalon into Omeka. The included documentation file Avalon Video Plugin.pdf goes through the steps to get the necessary information into the required fields in Omeka."

And the plugin --> https://github.com/wgcowan/avalonvideo

Even if you stay with Kaltura, you might investigate the Avalon module as a template for handling Kaltura content in the same way (since that's basically the way it's done in the GDAO theme currently... inserting an iframe).

Kevin

--
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who know better."

[Kevin S. Clarke]

Oops, no, I was wrong... it was the Internet Archive (Live Music Archive) recordings on the media page that used an iframe.  I believe they (IA) use the same open source player as Kaltura (Kaltura just gives you a management interface) so in theory you could do it that way still (or maybe not?)

Anyway, I've heard many good things about Avalon though so my recommendation of that still stands.  :-)

Kevin

[William G. Cowan]

Hello,
I developed the Avalon Plugin and I also developed another plugin for Omeka called VideoStream which allows you to segment and annotate a single video stream. The video streaming may originate from a variety of streaming servers. At IU we use Adobe Media Server so I focused a little more on that than any other server but basically if you can represent the stream as a url, you can pretty much build it into your Omeka item. For instance, you can stream from YouTube, set start and end points and add annotations to those segments. There are lots of other features for the plugin so if you're interested you might want to download the documentation and take a look.

Will

[nancy moussa]

Hi 

I wonder if you know the answer for my question. I created an item of type video and I read from youtube URL the video in iframe in my theme. So good so far. But if I try to attach the item to exhibit builder layout, bc there is no image attached to the item, the layout will display the caption for the item. I filter the function which do this and customized it in my custom.php but still the function in exhibit builder called first and the caption displayed then again the item displayed in my filter.

Any idea how to handle this

Nancy

Sent from my iPhone

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[William G. Cowan]

If all is well on the video side, the issue you are dealing with seems to be an exhibit builder issue. It executes a function that you have overwritten with a custom function. I am not sure how Exhibit Builder interacts with custom.php so I don't really have a good answer. Generally, the Exhibit Builder page just provides a link to show item through either a file image for the item or the caption if the image is missing. I am assuming that your function does more of a show item than just a link but it sounds like your code is not overwriting the EB function and you get both. Why this is happening is more of a question for the Exhibit Builder folks. I've not tried to display the item in the EB page but I have always used just the link.

Will

[eth...@ucsc.edu]

Thanks, Will!
Your plugins look like they'll cover most of the basic functionality we're looking for. I will definitely look through the documentation in more detail, and play with the plugins. Would you mind if I get in touch with you about them as we move forward with our media streaming efforts? We may want to extend your work in some ways.
Best,
Ned

[eth...@ucsc.edu]

Thanks Kevin. Avalon does seem like a very appealing option for the future, and your recommendation is another strong point in its favor. In the meantime I may set up an interim streaming solution using MediaElement.js as a player (same as Avalon), Apache w/ h264_mod as a server, and ffmpeg for transcoding. This should work nicely except for the lack of any admin interface, and it's all really robust, well maintained, free open source software (that I'm already familiar with, which is an important design consideration sometimes!). Moving to Avalon will probably make sense as we need fancier functionality.
Cheers!