Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

I recently met with the rest of the ITS Streaming Services team, and we discussed the direction we should take with the ITS QT streaming server. One feature that has been asked for is to make it open to student use. This has not been possible in its current iteration due to scalability issues. After some discussion, however, we thought that a good direction would be to eventually store the video assets in individual users' PASS space. This could solve the scalability issue as well as make it easier for anyone to manage their files. We were also able to make a slight change to the way the files are currently displayed. They will now be in alphabetical order when you login to your streaming server account. We also want to tie the streaming videos in PASS space to the PSU Blogs. So, if you wanted to make a blog post, there might be an option to upload a video file to go along with it that will automatically be compressed as a video that can be streamed. It would then embed the video into your blog post and possibly be served via a Flash movie player (if encoded as h.264). None of this will happen soon, however. We still need approval to head in this direction and possibly need to identify some available personnel to develop this service.

If you are unfamiliar with the ITS Streaming Server, you can get more info from this link:
http://its.psu.edu/streaming

• Faculty who are instructors of record need only to click the Login link at the top of that page to get an account. Others may request an account by emailing accounts@psu.edu. Students will not be given accounts yet, however. TAs may be given access to someone's streaming account by clicking the Manage Proxies link after logging into the account and adding the TA's userid to the proxy manager form.

• There is a 1 GB file size limit per upload, but no limits on the number of videos you may have on the server.

I will post again as we find out more about our plans for the streaming server.