Open Video Player initiative and more
A surefire way to detect the maturity of a technology is to look for frameworks to be developed in order to make using that technology simple and easy for everyone. This has recently become the case with Flash video. Not withstanding this week's usage of Silverlight by the Presidential Inaugural Committee, Flash video is without question the dominant way to deliver video on the web - and probably to all sorts of devices in the near future. In the past few months there have been a growing number of iniatives to simplify the process of getting video on your website. I know many of you are saying well what's wrong with just sending my stuff to Vimeo or Blip or even YouTube and embedding their players. Unfortunately that doesn't work for everyone for a variety of reasons. As a result we are seeing things like the Open Video Player initiative launched this week.
Content delivery network, Akamai, has taken the lead on creating an open source video framework that has all the hign-end functionality that high traffic services need. The project is focused on creating a set of libraries that handle things like bandwidth measurement and firewall navigation that you can use to build your own video players. These are features that people often leave out because they aren't the visible bells and whistles that tend to get focused on. Read more about this at Flash Magazine.
Another piece to this puzzle is the video platform being created by Kaltura. They are basically creating all the backend systems for ingestion and delivery of video as well as easy to use front-end apps. They are planning on releasing an open source community edition of the platform. Modules for Drupal, WordPress, Ruby, PHP, and wikis have recently showed up on the site alongside links to source code in SVN. What I like about Kaltura is they are also building a video delivery service on top of their own platform. If you choose, you can use them as a video host and forget all about doing your own development. Or you can grab the player modules and stream from their servers. Or grab everything and do it all on your own infrastructure.
Finally, in some what related news, we are really starting to see the appearance of useful video meta data. Adobe's Gunar Penikis has a great blog post and XMP and what it means in terms of accessing a wealth of information in your flv/f4v files. And at Adobe's design center they offer a good overview of the end to end workflow for video in CS4, making great use of meta data from creation through to delivery. What does all this mean to you and your users? Most importantly it means you can use the speech to text engine in Premiere and Soundbooth to generate text of all the dialogue in your video. This text can be used as the basis for a closed captioning system, or more broadly for a video search engine that let you jump to the location of a keyword in the video.
I've only scratched the surface here. But Flash video is clearly here to stay… for now at least.