We have a number of exceptional learning assets from the Australian Children Television Foundation. These are distributed on DVD and are in a variety of formats. The most common formats are Adobe PDF, DVD Movie, executable flash, FLV (Flash Video) and some html documents.

The challenge is to convert where required and upload the content into our network in a way that teachers can access and use within our network, but the resources cannot be copied or reused outside of the scope of our license.

The content of the DVDs should be in a format that a teacher in a remote or urban location can play the video on an electronic whiteboard or projector to the class and if a student misses out because they were absent, they can login from school or home to review the content at their convenience.

How did we do it?

Apart from our Adobe Connect Video Conferencing solution which uses the Flash Media Server, we don't have a dedicated media server. We will be establishing one this year and that is where our on demand video resources will live. For the mean time, we decided to use the installation of our Learning Management System, Moodle to house this content. This gave us a number of advantages.

The content could be "locked down" to comply with the licensing requirements.

It could be made available to legitimate users (our teachers and students) over the Internet using authentication from our network plus additional enrollment keys to restrict even further who had access to this material.

If this sounds tough, it isn't. Digital Rights Management and compliance with copyright is the right thing to do as it allows the creators of this content to protect their intellectual property and hopefully have enough pennies in the bank to make it worhwhile to keep creating great content for our students.

Our other issue is bandwidth. We needed to convert the content of the DVD movies into something that streamed. Streaming is different to downloading or even progressively downloading and offers an on demand solution for teachers looking for resources.

There were two technical challenges.

How to convert the movie into flash video (flv) with low enough bandwidth but high enough quality to be delivered on demand and played back on a projector. I used a product called AoA DVD Ripper http://www.aoamedia.com/dvd_ripper.htm which costs about 40 dollars AUD. This is not about endorsing a particular product but rather saying what worked for us.

I was able to load the DVD movies and specify flv as the output format.

I specified mpeg4 rather H.264 - Oddly I chose NTSC rather than PAL (even though the disks were definately PAL) because my initial yielded really bad audio disconnects with the video and changing it to NTSC fixed that problem.

Size and bandwidth

This is still subject to testing, but I chose 480 * 320 as my encoding size and set the rate at about 73 kilobytes per second or around 600 kilobits per second. Audio was set at 80 kilobits per second. This may prove too much for our current servers, which is why we are carrying the encoding of these DVD files in stages.

Once the files were complete, I created a new course in moodle and applied the Accordian block (module).

I zipped up all the flv files and pdf teacher resources into one zip file and uploaded that single file into the new course. I then unzipped the files on the server and starting linking the files into relevant topics. I grouped the  teacher resources into one area, the main movie into another and then the credits, special features and trailers into another.

There was another problem I encountered with converting flash exe packaged files into their original swf file. I have covered this in an earlier post.

http://www.xsymetrix.com.au/Share/index.cfm/2010/1/18/converting-exe-files-to-flash-swf-files

One of the big problems is that if Moodle wants to try and back this course content up which runs into gigabytes, something is going to break. We have to make sure that we exclude these courses from standard backup - or at least exclude the files directory from backup.

I am sure I will contribute a follow up to this exercise and feel free to share this experience with others or add your own comments.

 

 

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