Introduction
I’d like to share an idea that I think will form the most maintainable and robust solution for empowering Plone with video capabilities.
My name is Zohar Babin and I lead Developer Relations and Community at Kaltura.
Kaltura is an Open Source Video Platform. Kaltura provides the ability to quickly and cost effectively enhance web sites and RIA with video and interactive rich-media (video, photo, text, audio) functionalities including; video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, monetizing and more. [read more]
Kaltura is also a founding member of the Open Video Alliance - coalition of organizations and individuals devoted to creating and promoting free and open technologies, policies, and practices in online video.
By integrating Plone with Kaltura we can provide Plone with all interactive and collaborative video and rich-media functionalities, based on a maintainable, rapidly growing and updated Open Source rich-media and video solution.
About Kaltura
Kaltura is dedicated to providing and promoting Open Source Video Solutions. KalturaCE is the flagship server project that provides multiple encoding engines management (by default bundled with FFMPEG and Mencoder) including conversion profiles management, content ingestion (uploading and importing), moderation and management, media manipulation, application management, syndication and CDN integration - all through simple and easy to use APIs and auto-generated client libraries. The Kaltura Platform includes a series of widgets and applications - an interactive and extendable media player, online web based video editors (KSE, KAE), content ingestion wizard and various plugins and extensions for known CMS (Drupal, MindTouch, Joomla), blogging platform (WordPress), social networking software (Elgg), collaboration (MediaWiki, TikiWiki), and LMS extensions for Moodle, Sakai and Blackboard.
Kaltura and Plumi to power Plone
Like other Kaltura extensions for CMS platforms, based on the Kaltura APIs and Client Libraries, extending Plone with Kaltura’s capabilities will be based on the APIs and a Kaltura Python library.
I envision Plumi as the middle layer; Plumi will provide the Plone UI, user flow and integration to Kaltura APIs while Kaltura will serve as the media backbone (”plumbing” the video - encoding, thumbnail creation, video and image manipulation, etc.) and media applications (player, editor, ingestion, recording, etc.).
Similar to how Plone is built on top of the CMF that is built on Zope. Integrating Plumi with Kaltura will provide Plumi with the freedom to focus on the best Plone UIs and user flows for media handling and sharing as well as Plone specific management tools for media. This will also provide a seamlessly updateable and maintained rich-media and video solution based on Kaltura.
Additional Resources
Understanding Kaltura, The Kaltura Projects, Kaltura Player KDP - Kaltura Dynamic Player, integrating KDP, Editors and KCW (Create a basic Kaltura application)
Content Ingestion: KSU - Kaltura Simple Uploader and KCW - Kaltura Contribution Wizard
Introduction to Developers: Getting started with Kaltura api_v3 and Testing the API with the TestMe Console, the Kaltura APIs client libraries, Extending KDP functionality with KDP Flash Modules .
If you’d like to learn more - see Kaltura.com and Kaltura.org and watch the Kaltura webinar: Introduction to Open Video or register for the upcoming (October 7th) webinar Expanding Education with Online Video.
Integration Steps
- As Plone and Plumi are written in Python, the first step will be to Create a Client Library Generator in Python
- Decouple media manipulation parts from Plumi and use the Kaltura Client Library
Summary
In summary, I’d like to suggest that we use Kaltura as the base for media tasks, and Plumi as the middle layer between Plone and the Kaltura APIs as well as the for the UI and user flows for Plone.
Please share your opinion and ideas…