The Challenge of Audio and Video
From DSpace Wiki
Audio and video bitstreams can be very large, and take a long time to download, even on a fairly fast network. Yet users have been conditioned to expect nearly instant access to them on other services. How can we provide these voluminous documents in a way that makes them pleasant to use?
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[edit] Who's interested?
Add your contact info. here if you want to join the discussion, whether you have a suggestion or not.
User:Mwood, User:Dsalo, User:Byhisdeeds, User:John Davison, User:Pkeane, User:Jstirnaman, User:Canderson34, User:ejansson, User:chodge5, User:Joseph John
[edit] Issues
[edit] Flash video callouts
Flash video can apparently act much like HTML, including relative links to external resources such as images and soundfiles. The existing HTML-management code (primary bitstream etc.) might be extensible to cover this situation.
Flash's .flv file format allows for a progressive download of video data, which provides a sometimes acceptable alternative to streaming servers for smaller files.
[edit] Ideas
[edit] Wrapper document pointing to a streaming service
I've experimented briefly with storing as one bitstream of a DSpace item a minimal SMIL wrapper which points to the content on a streaming service. Like so:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <smil xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/Language"> <body> <video src='rtsp://129.79.6.46:554/vic/david_lewis_20060228.rm'/> </body> </smil>
For preservation purposes, it would be good to deposit a copy of the material in DSpace itself as well. That way you have a "slow" copy associated with metadata, and a "fast" copy that streaming clients can access quickly.
