Bryan Spaulding, Media Practice Lead at Optaros, and I have been thinking about lightweight digital asset management and Alfresco. Alfresco can manage any kind of asset, including rich media. It has some built-in functionality for doing image transformations and you can easily integrate with open source solutions like ffmpeg to work with video. But many of our clients need something more, especially when it comes to video.
That’s where Kaltura comes in. Kaltura is a fully hosted video solution that provides full analytics, flexible and customizable players and playlists, and robust back-end CDN and hosting services. You can also download the open source Kaltura Community Edition and run it yourself if you want.
There are a variety of ways Alfresco and Kaltura could work together. We decided to start with a basic integration focused on the Alfresco DM repository. The idea is to use that as a foundation, expanding in the future based on community and client feedback to include deeper functionality for the DM repository or broader integration with other Alfresco products like Alfresco Share and Alfresco WCM.
In this short screencast, I demo the basic CRUD functions the integration provides. You will probably want to hit the “full screen” icon on the Kaltura player to see the detail.
The integration is available as open source. You can download the integration from Kaltura’s community site and use it on your projects, or better yet, expand on it and contribute back the code. The readme that is included with the source includes installation and configuration instructions.
It would be great to see how an integration with Share could work with this, one of the barriers to delivering more DAM-like capabilities there is that the ffmpeg transformations we’ve played around with here get executed on the same server, thus are only so scalable.
I get the impression that Kaltura is designed to manage this load much better, so one idea might be to leverage it to generate doclib-style thumbnails and FLV previews of videos uploaded into Share.
I’ve already started a Forge project for this type of integration here – http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/share-mediaxtns/.
Will,
Yes, definitely Kaltura offloads the transcoding and transformations from the Alfresco server.
It would be easy to do a Share integration based on this integration. I’ve coded up a stateless service that I’ve exposed as a root object in JavaScript. The service wraps the Kaltura Client Library for Java. (That was the most time-consuming piece of the integration–they didn’t have a Java client library for the most recent version of their API so I ported their dot net library to Java for them). Anyway, you should be able to send the asset to Kaltura and then get the thumbnail URL back which you could present in the Share UI. You could also easily show the Kaltura media player in the Share UI as well.
Another thought I had is that Kaltura makes it easy for people to capture and remix video through their web browser. With the prevalence of web cams, you could easily do asynchronous collab with video snippets instead of (boring) type-written threads. So you’d have a bunch of Kaltura-managed video snippets in a discussion thread in Share.
Kaltura can also do things with Office document conversion that goes beyond what Alfresco can currently do OOTB. For example, you can upload a presentation and a video of someone speaking, and then sync those up. That might also be a nice place for Alfresco to plug in given the number of presentations typically managed in an Alfresco repo.
Jeff
Hi,
I’m Akinori from aegif corp. in Japan, Alfresco partner.
I think one of our prospects will be interested in this integration. Could I put Japanese subtitle on your screencast and show it to them?
Regards
Ishii,
Yes, that would be great.
Jeff
Thank you.
I made it today. Now I got 43.9MB .mov file here.
Are you interested in Japanese subtitled version of your video? If so, could you tell me where to upload?
Akinori
Akinori,
Thanks for doing that. I’ll send you an email on this shortly.
Jeff