Media Server online
September 5, 2008 at 7:40 am 2 comments
WashingtonOnline is now offering a media server to online instructional staff. A media server allows faculty to add classroom materials in the form of video, audio and other large files into online classrooms, for viewing or download by students. The main goal is to help ease the classroom size restrictions and allow more supplementary materials to be offered. (Classrooms hosted by WashingtonOnline have limits as to the total size
of files and other course content that they may contain. Most courses don’t come near these limits but a few do and would benefit from more storage space.)
To use, ELC and faculty may login to the WAOL.org website and choose the new Media Server Upload or Search links. These pages have some usage and other help information.
More info on the purpose and design of this new system can be found here:
Media Server Overview
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1.
Ralph Hogaboom | September 8, 2008 at 8:44 am
Does the uploader do any conversion? If an instructor had an Xvid slideshow that was 150 MBs, what would the flash player deliver to the client?
This is really cool, and seems like a smart move to go S3. Keep it up.
2.
waol | September 15, 2008 at 9:40 am
Hi Ralph, no there’s no conversion done when uploading or streaming. It’s really just a simple file server on the Internet.
In your case, the students would need to have the Xvid player installed to view the slideshow. The same is true for SWF, MOV, and other file formats, except that these are handled almost by default with some commonly installed players, Flash and Quicktime in this case.
And uploads are limited to 45MB for now. But I’d think for anyone on dial-up this seems to be a reasonable limitation.
thanks!