Lunch & Learn: David Hopkins on Kaltura at Princeton

David Hop­kins, who man­ages the Broad­cast Cen­ter at Prince­ton, needed a uni­fied, cen­tral­ized solu­tion for users to upload, store, backup, edit, and share video. Kaltura is an open source video stream­ing ser­vice that has done those things since its launch ear­lier this year. The Prince­ton home page, Black­board courses, social media venues, depart­men­tal sites, and other users have greatly increased the amount of video that they are shar­ing, and Hop­kins needed a tool that would meet those increased needs. The goal was to cen­tral­ize stor­age, backup and man­age­ment of video and audio files, and make them avail­able in a vari­ety of for­mats to meet the needs of a long list of devices.

In the recent past, video and audio at Prince­ton were typ­i­cally stored in lots of dif­fer­ent places on campus, like Roxen, per­sonal servers or work machines. Serv­ing video from file servers and other places that are not built for video dis­tri­b­u­tion leads to slow per­for­mance, low avail­abil­ity, and very often, a loss of the con­tent if the stor­age is not backed up.

With Kaltura, there are many ben­e­fits in a cen­tral­ized method of man­age­ment. The large amount of data stor­age allows for  high qual­ity video, con­verted into lots of transcoded (one video for­mat con­verted into other formats) formats of the orig­i­nal video, called fla­vors in Kaltura parlance. Built-in file man­age­ment allows peo­ple to organize, tag, and find their con­tent. Adding meta­data to video and audio con­tent makes it more rea­son­able to find, man­age and orga­nize. The more infor­ma­tion (e.g. author, copy­right infor­ma­tion, title, and descrip­tion) attached to the video file, the bet­ter. Kaltura asks you to add meta­data at the time of upload, and allows you to edit the data as you wish later.

The issue of transcod­ing is an issue when you need to con­vert an entire library or set of videos, because it is proces­sor inten­sive and time-consuming — Kaltura auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates mul­ti­ple for­mats of each item when you upload it, so that if your par­tic­u­lar device does not sup­port Flash based video, for instance, Kaltura will offer an alter­na­tive that is more likely to work.

Hop­kins explained many rea­sons that Prince­ton chose Kaltura. Centralized stor­age and backup is a key rea­son. Per­sonal, exter­nal hard dri­ves are inex­pen­sive, but flawed, and often fail. More­over, they are not often backed up. Cen­tral­ized video stor­age pro­vides a sys­tem wide backup, avail­able from any­where. Com­pa­nies such as HBO, Best Buy, the NBA and many aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions, includ­ing some Ivy Plus (http://corp.kaltura.com/content/customers) use Kaltura. The code is open source, mean­ing that any­one who knows how to pro­gram in stan­dard lan­guages can make use of the code to meet their own needs (http://www.kaltura.org/) and share the solu­tions with others. Kaltura Exchange (http://exchange.kaltura.com/) pro­vides an active devel­oper com­mu­nity and mar­ket­place where plu­g­ins are dis­cussed, devel­oped, and used to solve needs of mul­ti­ple users.

The key fea­tures of Kaltura include the abil­ity to record a pre­sen­ta­tion on your web­cam and upload it, orga­nize files, add meta­data to video and audio, cre­ate playlists and cus­tomized play­ers, pub­lish to many file for­mats, and give access, pri­vacy & copy­right controls. The access con­trols are incred­i­bly impor­tant. The TEACH act asks pub­lish­ers to remove copy­righted con­tent for aca­d­e­mic courses for teach­ing pur­poses when a course ends. Those date restric­tions are applied in advance in Kaltura. Video ana­lyt­ics allow video pub­lish­ers to know how many peo­ple are see­ing their video. Sim­ple video edit­ing tools allow for screen­shots or video cap­tures (vid­caps) and movie clipping. Plugins exist for Dru­pal, Black­board, Word­Press, and other pub­lish­ing plat­forms that Prince­ton already uses. Kaltura has mobile device spe­cific deliv­ery abil­i­ties (fla­vors, or transcod­ing types) that allow iPhones, which do not have Flash avail­able, to see a video in alter­nate formats. Distribution and shar­ing tools allow view­ers to share to Face­book, Twit­ter, Email, and many other destinations. If you need peo­ple to see the video for your event in real-time, live video stream­ing and broad­cast­ing are possible.

Per­haps one of the most pow­er­ful fea­tures in Kaltura is its Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face (API) set. Ben John­ston, Man­ager at the Human­i­ties Resource Cen­ter (HRC) at Prince­ton, spoke about his use of Kaltura’s APIs to solve fac­ulty teach­ing needs. In help­ing fac­ulty to merge stream­ing video into their course­work, he works with thou­sands of files with his team at the HRC, and Kaltura makes it easy to man­age and cat­a­log those files. John­ston says that the API has lots of options, and that he tends to learn the func­tions he needs as projects call for them. Using com­mands that you send to Kaltura, you can build a web-based inter­face to load, play, stop rewind, mute, unmute, full-screen, get the time­code, trig­ger actions at spe­cific times, skip to a spe­cific time, and set a spe­cific dura­tion with all the audio and video that you have rights to in the system.

Recently, Johnston used Kaltura to cre­ate screen­shots cap­tured from videos. He built a web site that allows stu­dents to grab indi­vid­ual frames from spe­cific movies to ana­lyze a shot in that movie. He made a Kaltura player with a screen­shot but­ton for stu­dents to use to col­lect screen­shots. With­out Kaltura, he said, it would have still been pos­si­ble, but far more difficult.

Sys­tems at Prince­ton that con­nect to Kaltura include Word­Press, Dru­pal, Share­Point, Black­board, Roxen, and BuddyPress. Hopkins invited peo­ple to visit Princeton’s Medi­a­space, http://bcmedia.princeton.edu/mediaspace, to see Kaltura-based Prince­ton con­tent, and to con­sider what they might do with the system.

The screen­cast of Hop­kins’ talk is below.