[Dspace-general] Week 4: Bitstream types (Dorothea Salo)

[Mark H. Wood]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 11:44:48AM -0500, Hugh Paterson III wrote:
> True, but unlike stationary (paper based) media in order for a user to  
> "pre-view" an audio or video file they have to "see" multiple portions  
> of the file. With traditional media I read a paragraph or an abstract  
> and say this article is going to be worth reading let me download it.  
> but with video I am going to want to see if it is relevant or if the  
> quality is good enough. So I am going to want a preview function as a  
> user. YouTube offers this feature where a user can start viewing the  
> file from any point. For the system to load a full size preview and  
> then for the user to not download it seems wasteful in terms of  
> bandwidth.  H.264 has a great scalable features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 

I think that's a job for browser plugins, not DSpace.  Writing a
whole new video player in Javascript sounds daunting.

And we still need to address streaming vs. download-and-then-view.

>    So why not automatically create a "preview" version when ever an  
> audio/video file is added to the archive? Sure. There may be people  
> who want the MPEG-2 file but there are people that will be served the  
> file who don't want that original file. Why not serve them an h.264  
> preview of the file and then also serve them a link to the MPEG-2  
> file.  Just like flikr.com gives users size options when they download  
> pictures why not give users a size option when downloading video/audio/ 
> pictures in d-space?

Now that sounds modest enough that we might be able to do it before
2015.  A suitable XMLUI theme might pick off video bitstreams, for
example, and offer them as sizes, IF it can tell that certain
bitstreams are resampled versions of each other.  Is there a metadata
standard for marking them as such?

Hmmm, how easy is it to plug new *actions* into the ingestion process?
Some collections might want automatic scaling, others clipping, others
still extraction, others something we can't imagine.  If we
accommodate every taste we're going to rile up the people who say that
submission is already too complicated.

By the way, we need to be careful about patents in the video area.
There are a lot of them.  On H.264 for example.  Some things it may
not be possible to build into a redistributable product.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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