Multimedia Asset

[Samuel Schluep]

Development of a multimedia asset content type. This should make it easier to integrate multimedia assets, almost like the integration of images. This may be useful not only for dLCMS but only for Silva-Sites.

The formats to be supported should comprise Flash, Quicktime (maybe also AVI?), Java. (And maybe JavaScript applets?! I now you will find this problematic, but I already had some e-learning content developers who wanted to create JavaScript quizzes.) I can imagine either having one content type that can integrate the different formats or several separate asset types for the formats mentioned above.

The asset can be embedded into Silva Documents using the External Source mechanism. The asset might store some default settings for the HTML code generation (e.g. width, height, params) that can be overwritten by the external source. The external source should be able to provide a lookup window to choose the asset.

I propose to take a look at the external sources delivered with the current dLCMS release: the required parameters for each type, the possibility to specify further parameters, the generated HTML object/embed code. It may be further interesting to take a look at the "Movie embed" ETH-code source.

Here are some ideas that relate to specific formats:

- The Java asset could have a setting, wheter the applet tag should be used or whether the Java-Plugin technology should be used.

- Video: There might be an video asset for different formats (Quicktime and AVI). The user can provide different videos for different client plattforms.

- Quicktime: If a streaming server is used, the browser needs to upload a a "Poster"-movie per HTTP and hand it over to the Quicktime-Plugin which then opens the RTSP connection. Such a "Poster"-movie can also be a simple text file with an .mov extension and the following contents:
    rtsptext
    rtsp://hollywood.ethz.ch/dlcms/peripheriesehen.mov
Maybe this rtsp-url could be specified directly in the asset settings instead of uploading a separate text file.