Archive:Collaborative Video

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Background

As recently announced, the Wikimedia Foundation and Kaltura have begun a process aimed at bringing rich-media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki websites. The vision of this project is to enable the Wikipedia community to further enhance and enrich Wikipedia articles with rich-media content. The technology behind this project is a form of video-wiki software that is integrated into the Mediawiki platform as an extension, allowing users to add collaborative video players that enable all users to add and edit images, sounds, diagrams, animations and movies in the same manner as they do today with text.

We expect this project to help promote the ability of every human being to enjoy the fruits of all human knowledge, including rich-media. In addition, adding rich-media will assist users in explaining and understanding definitions by presenting the visual aspect together with the textual explanation. By incorporating rich media, Wikipedia and other wiki projects will be able to further enhance the quality and richness of their content and truly surpass any existing encyclopedia in the world.

How to get involved

The project is still in beta testing, and does not yet enable this functionality on Wikipedia. However, you can see a preview of how the technology will work in the following wikis:

• WikiEducator
• Kaltura

The collaborative video project is managed as an open source project, and the code is available under the GPL on SourceForge,

Comments, ideas, bug reports and suggestions for improvement are welcome, and are being collected on a special Feedback page.

You can also sign up for a newsletter that will post updates and news by sending an email to wiki@kaltura.com (email subject: get updates).

Status of open source release

Kaltura is in the process of stabilizing the code and releasing it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 3).

So far, 5 packages and detailed documentation have been released, including:

• Contrib_wizard: this ActionScript package handles the search and import of media from a variety of sources of Creative Commons and public domain resources, and allows users to upload material from their local machines.

• Editor: this ActionScript provides a non-linear timeline based online editing environment that allows users to remix, re-sequence, cut, trim, overlay, annotate, and edit video, audio, animation, and images. The package includes an extension framework that allows non-core developers to develop plugins, including overlays, transitions, and effects, including layers of real-time data.

• Player: this ActionScript package provides a smart player that can read metadata files and play collaborative videos as well as single videos and dynamic data such as RSS feeds.

• Mediawiki extension: this PHP package is a wrapper for the Contrib_wizard, Editor, and Player, which allows those packages to be smoothly integrated into the mediawiki environment. it builds a new kaltura namespace, and provides integration with mediawiki's user authentication and article history.

• Kaltura_sdk: this PHP package provides back-end services to support the contrib_wizard, player, and editor. it allows authenticating users, adding media, and publishing collaborative videos.

Packages that are still being worked on:

• ingestion_module: this package is a PHP wrapper for the popular ffMPEG, that provides tools for massive ingestion and conversion of content to remixable format.

• streamer: this PHP package provides file streaming optimization used by the player and editor.

• db_wrapper_and_utils: this PHP package provides back-end support services for handling media and users