Category

Service

Description

For audio and video files

Audio and video are being used for educational purposes more and more. Moving images are used to clarify and enliven classes. Another reason for using video in (higher) education is its possibility to watch classes and meetings live or on-demand. Moreover, audio and video play an increasingly big part for several disciplines of research, such as social and medical sciences. SURFmedia, SURFnet's on-line media platform, makes this all possible in a simple way.
The service comprises a Multimedia centre, Live (the former RTV guide) and Community & Support. The Multimedia centre contains a large collection of audiovisual material, from higher education itself and from external content suppliers, such as the Dutch Institute for Picture and Sound. With Live students, teachers and researchers can watch and create live broadcasts. In Community & Support, knowledge on the use of streaming media in higher education can be exchanged. FAQ's, how to's and the helpdesk can also be found here.

Features

• Connection to SURFfederation - it is possible to log on with a personal account
• Standard free 1 GB for uploading media files
• Possibility to personally put together collections of files
• Advanced possibilities to screen audio and video files
• Extensive search options
• Well-organised presentation of audiovisual materials by using metadata and flash previews
• RSS feeds when new files have become available
• Possibility  to set up a live broadcast

Conditions for use

• The service is available to students, teachers and researchers in higher education and research.
• Users can upload up to 1GB of video free of charge

Language

• Dutch

More information

• See: www.surfmedia.nl
• Contact: help@surfmedia.nl

Category

Software (open source)

Description

MediaMosa is a Full Featured, Webservice Oriented Media Management and Distribution platform.

MediaMosa is a state-of-the-art, scalable Middleware Media Distribution Platform and facilitates access to, and usage of (shared) storage capacity, metadata databases, transcoding- and streaming servers. The platform offers functionality for searching, playing, uploading, transcoding, as well as a fine granularity media access control system towards its users. MediaMosa is based on the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture and is designed to support content streaming applications by providing a back-end-, audio- and video-infrastructure.

Features

• Delivery platform for audio, video (and other content)
• Streaming of any format (e.g. Flash, H.264 MPEG-4 and WindowsMedia)
• Transcoding based on FFmpeg
• Flexible Metadata Element Sets
• Open Source under GPLv2 license

Conditions for use

• MediaMosa is a free and open software package. It is based on the Drupal CMS and supports the use of several other Open Source software such as FFmpeg
• Open source under the GPLv2 license

Language

• English

More information

• See www.mediamosa.org
• Contact: help@surfmedia.nl

Category

Research initiative (project)

Description

CineGrid is an international research initiative that was established to promote research, development and deployment of new distributed applications of ultra-high performance digital media (sound and picture) over advanced networks, using Grid computing technologies for networked collaboration.

Features

The CineGrid project will combine the state-of-the-art visual and audio recording technologies along with high-speed photonic networks and ultra sharp projection facilities to record and deliver very high quality moving images and sound across continents. The resulting impression is overwhelming and resembles that of being present at a live performance. The technology is called "4K" after the number of horizontal pixels in the image, 4096x2160 per frame; four times that of High Definition Television and equivalent to 35 MM film. A one-and-a-half-hour recording before compression contains roughly 3.5 Terabytes of data – the amount of data that fits on about 1.200 DVD's. Sound will also be in very high quality, with 24 channels uncompressed audio for much richer sound than normal audio CD recordings.

Goal/Mission

To build an interdisciplinary community that is focused on the research, development, and demonstration of networked collaborative tools to enable the production, use and exchange of very-high-quality digital media over photonic networks.

Conditions for use

See: http://www.cinegrid.org/index.php?option=com_content

Language

• English
• Dutch

More information

• http://www.cinegrid.org/
• http://www.waag.org/project/cinegrid