#68: Refactor Multimedia Support

Contents

1. Motivation
2. Proposal

Proposed by

Tom Caswell

Seconded by

Marion Jensen, USU OCW

Proposal type

User interface, Architecture

Assigned to release

• eduCommons 3.2.0 (Unreleased)

State

in-progress

Motivation

Audio and video support is becoming more important for many OCW sites. This proposal provides improved handling of these types of media files.

Proposal

Implement Plone4Artists, or our own Audio and Video file support if theirs is not ready. Here are the main features we are looking to implement for eduCommons:

(more details here: http://www.plone4artists.org/products)

Plone4ArtistsAudio
Upload a normal File to your Plone site, and Plone4ArtistsAudio will detect it as an MP3 or Ogg file and "decorate" it with metadata.
Plone4ArtistsVideo
Upload a video file to your Plone site and it is automatically detected as a video file, and an appropriate player is used on the view page. You can also add videos that are hosted at Google Video, YouTube, blip.tv, etc. and they will be embedded in your Plone site.

Here are some other features that might also be available through the plone for artists product:
Plone4ArtistsImage*
Upload an image to your Plone site, and if recognized as a photo, it is "enhanced" with additional metadata. Also provide an image container which has support for slideshows and symbolic photos.
Plone4ArtistsPortfolio*
Artists and bands can create a portfolio of their recordings, songs, gigs, news. Also provides podcasting, RSS feeds and drag-n-drop addition of content and page layout.
PloneFlashUpload*
The PloneFlashUpload tool lets you select multiple files to be uploaded, and they are all uploaded in bulk using a Flash-based tool in the browser. The tool shows a progress bar indicator for each file and an overall progress bar indicator, so you can see how much time is remaining.

*These additional features will probably not be implemented unless these is strong community support for them, so please leave comments if you are interested in some or all of these additional features.