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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?
Who's interested?
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Mark H. Wood,
Dsalo,
Byhisdeeds,
John Davison,
Pkeane,
Jstirnaman,
Canderson34,
ejansson,
chodge5,
Joseph John
Kshepherd
Colleen Greene
Issues
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.
Ideas
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:
| Code Block |
|---|
<?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.
DSpace 1.5 XMLUI and Progressive FLV Video Download
This experiment is described on the DSpace 1.5 XMLUI FLV Video Progressive Download page.
Discussion elsewhere
Overview
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