How do you store and deliver pictures and videos on network?

[dozy]

I'm sure our school is like most in that the teachers like to take hundreds if not thousands of blurry pictures and they all need to be saved to a network shared drive so they can access them for lessons - PE department is a prime example!

Now our staff are getting more adventurous and are wanting to use video's for starters in lessons etc. Some are ones they've taken themselves but the majority are of video's from youtube or other dodgy video/tv sharing sites.

So there are a number of problems:

1. Need to have these files stored in school as using links to external sites like youtube are unreliable and if its home made video's they don't want to be on youtube for obvious reasons and usually the video's are over 10 mins.
2. Storing all these pictures and video's is going to take up a lot of space - 1Tb? Backup/not?
3. Teachers always want to put these video's into a powerpoint so has to be an easy way of embedding them and powerpoint prefers wmv files which take up so much more space than flv's
4. Need easy way of copying youtube video onto this server (probably as an flv) but then if teachers want to download the video make it so the flv is converted to a wmv so they can embed it to powerpoint.

Has anyone found a really good way of doing all that or something similar and of course you know whats coming next, it has to free or virtually free?

I look forward to reading any suggestions,
Thanks,
Chris.

[TechMonkey]

I am looking at creating a media server using an open source web package. Not decided which yet but there have been a few suggested on here. Basically a 6TB NAS will be attached so space shouldn't be an issue. Things can be linked and accessed from outside, but won't be embedded in Powerpoints.
There are also commercial offerings, can't remember the one I saw recently from a college, something like Kingswood or Kingsmead.

[wesleyw]

ClipBucket using Debian and outskirts scripts to install CB on it and there you go a decent Video Sharing site. As for Audio and Pictures there is a pay for Desktop uploader that will upload them to CB (£50 for the uploader) videos are done within the website. It converts most video formats into MP4 and then you have three options embed code to embed the video in another website, url source for linking in a powerpoint and download. I'm working on a few options for up including an LDAP module may get them to write that around £160 I think until then there is only an admin account and a teacher account everything else is guest viewing

Wes

[AndyNDuffy]

We currently use Clickview as it is really easy for staff and students to use and I think is quite good value. They also have TV recording and live video distribution options which are reasonably priced. Have a look at www.clickview.co.uk. Note you don’t need to subscribe to their content if you don’t want to (we don’t) which makes it cheaper. Let me know if you want to know more.

[dhicks]

I am looking at creating a media server using an open source web package.

I was thinking along similar lines, although I was planning to write the web interface part of things myself. The above post lists a fairly common set of issues, which to my mind point towards a system that integrates with Active Directory, so images placed on the server can be attributed to a user. It would also perform some kind of deduplication in the background, so the user wouldn't have to worry about posting images that have already been used, they can just shovel a whole camera's-worth over at a time. Having tried all the deduplicating filesystems I could find, I figured writing my own deduplicating routine would be better - it's actually dead easy, you just calculate a checksum for each image as it comes in.

I think an open source approach would be a good one, although there would scope for making money alongside this by selling image/video content to go on the server.

I've been busy moving house since the summer, but I've now got to the stage where I have a development server set up and am looking to start writing some code. Have you started any development yet - would it make sense for us to collaborate here?

--
David Hicks

[FragglePete]

We too got the ClickView System new this year with the 24/7 product - the teachers love it and we've got a nice library of videos building up.

Pete

[bart21]

we use php motion. It runs on linux. It is like youtube. Our staff use it alot.

take a look at ours peeletube

any questions feel free to ask.

nick