Audio & Video Streaming Supporting Student Skills Development Wayne Britcliffe E-Learning Development Team University of York

Learning & Teaching Drivers  Increasing demand from staff wanting to deliver audio/video resources in support of their teaching activities  A number of departments have a particular need for audio/video delivery: –Music –Film, Theatre and Television –Health Sciences –Language and Linguistics –Hull York Medical School  A central push towards developing student induction/transition resources and student skills materials that draw heavily on video clips

Technical Considerations & Drivers  Staff won’t necessarily have html or audio/video development skills  Audio/video will need to be consumed both on and off campus  Audio/video resources need to be as secure as reasonably possible  The same streaming server and player should be leveraged in the VLE and also the public domain  The player needs to be as accessible as possible and preferably Flash based

The Streaming Server  First trial: Helix –Didn’t support Flash and tied to Real –Can be secured but is an expensive solution  Second trial: Flash Media Server –Security required custom coding server side which had to be in ActionScript –Need the more expensive flavour of server  Third trial: Wowza Media Server –Allows H264/AAC and FLV/F4V streaming –Server side uses Java –Strategically neutral (not Adobe/Real tied) and used quite ubiquitously

The Client Side Video Player  First trial: User installed players –WMP, QuickTime and realPlayer  Second trial: Custom built Flash player  Third trial 1: JWPlayer –Has a Javascript interface for customisation but harder to develop for in comparison to Flowplayer  Third trial 2: Flowplayer –Well documented Javascript API for customisation (with many examples) –Out of the box extension for accessibility (fully documented)

How we integrated it with Blackboard The Building Block creates a Content Item that has iFrame code built into it. This points back to the Building Block When the page is requested the play button square is drawn When the square is clicked the Building Block is triggered to make security checks - Still stream-able? - Adaptively release rules?

How we integrated it with Blackboard  The Building Block creates a Content Item that has iFrame code built in to it that points to the Building Block  When the page is requested the black square play ‘button’ is drawn  When the play button is clicked the BBlock is triggered and makes security checks: –Still streamable? –Adaptive release?  If happy then the BBlock sends a re-direct to the systems player Cold Fusion application (external) with parameters (location/width/height etc). The BBlock also generates a ‘golden ticket’ (this includes its life span and shared secret signature)  The Cold Fusion returns more HTML but mainly Javascript to configure FlowPlayer. The Javascript has the start playing request inc. the golden ticket info. The browser loads and renders Flowplayer (a flash Movie)  FlowPlayer makes the streaming request to the streaming server (Wowza) inc. the extra parameters. Our custom code checks the shared secret is valid and decides whether to serve the video

One or two whys  Why an iFrame? –allows us to deliver one player only (to both public & VLE requests). Easier to maintain –Felt to be less problematic than Javascript delivered into the currently rendered page (less chance of local conflicts etc.)  Why not security check at the streaming server? –The Building Block has immediate access to all the relevant security information (though the Blackboard API) –All the streaming server has to do is validate the ticket

How staff store their media clip

How staff embed their media clip

Student Transition (demo)

Practical Work in Chemistry (demo)

Education & Development (demo)

Feedback  General feedback from staff –Easy to upload/integrate –Streaming off campus vital (Chem) –Support & guidance required for processing video (Chem/Ed Studies/History)  From students (Chemistry) Very good to show how to carry out a procedure which you may not have done before. Also, they were good to remind you even if you had performed the procedure before. They were not too long either so were easy to watch. Think they are excellent, hope they are a permanent feature on the VLE. It enables us to see how to do things much more effectively than written instructions and some lab demos.

Moving forward  Staff Issues: –Audio/video editing/export –Hardware use/choice –Digitisation –DVD Extraction –Copyright/licensing –Support  Future Development: –Student video uploads –Back-end video processing –More flexible embedding of video –Automatic bandwidth selection

Questions

Useful information  (Flowplayer)  (JW Player)  (Wowza)  diaserver/ (Flash Media Server) diaserver/  services/helix-server-proxy.aspx (Helix) services/helix-server-proxy.aspx  bb_bb60/user/vlesupport/Opportunities/C lick_here_to_access_links_to_ (This presentation on our wiki) bb_bb60/user/vlesupport/Opportunities/C lick_here_to_access_links_to_  (Our support site)