Kaltura: Interactive Multi-User Video Service
Kaltura is an interactive, multi-user video editing platform made available as a service. They provide plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and MediaWiki, as well as a reference implementation and detailed documentation for how to leverage their service in PHP and Ruby.
In essence, Kaltura provides a mechanism whereby users can upload, transcode, and edit video used in web sites. Click “remix” button below to get a sense of the capabilities Kaltura offers.
These are videos of my dogs, Georgia and Lucy.
open source video, online video platform, video solutionI’d put Kaltura’s model, in which plugins to open source web frameworks and languages are combined with services offered “from the cloud,” in the context of what I’ve been calling the Assembled Web. Businesses get the flexibility and agility of the open source stack while leveraging the economies of scale and ease of management offered by SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).
Some other similar services have started to emerge, including CDN2 (a video offering for Drupal) and (Optaros Partner) Acquia‘s Mollom-based anti-spam and hosted search (also for Drupal).
Mixing the strength of open source and collaborative development models with the financial benefits of SAAS is something we expect to see much more of in 2009.
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Sure beats the days of Premier 5! TechCrunch was giving away free video hosting (100GB) on the Kaltura platform earlier today (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/22/got-a-drupal-site-get-100gb-of-video-hosting-and-streaming-free-from-kaltura-first-50-only/). I expect we’ll see a significant uptick in interest in both the app and the overall model as awareness of this grows.
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I did some remixing but I was expecting a “save as”. Like I wanted to create something new and maybe add my own clips, then save the new thing I created kind of like a video comment or something but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how I would do that or even if it is possible.
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:10 pm
@Jeff There is an “add video comment” link below the comment form, but that’s separate from the “remix” experience.
I can see what you mean about saving different versions – haven’t really looked into the customization possibilities here, just using the Kaltura WordPress plugin “out of the box”
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:26 am
So how well do OpenID plugin and Kaltura video comments play together?
December 24th, 2008 at 11:22 am
There’s an interesting discussion about Kaltura going on on #drupal irc. Apparently the player may embed partner links (ie link spam) in sites where it’s used. See the function _kaltura_replace_tags in kaltura.theming.inc. There will probably be a Drupal Planet post about this shortly and it’s not likely to be favorable. May be something to keep an eye on.
December 24th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
The $hidden_links there does look rather like link spam, though since the module itself is GPL one could easily take them out – see lines 61-67 of kaltura.themeing.inc where $hidden_links is defined and then line 90 where it is output.
December 29th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Testing out integration with WP-Twit-ID plugin.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:45 am
So, John, do you know if Disqus has to be disabled for Kaltura to work in the comments? I have Kaltura installed, but I also have Disqus installed and I don’t see a button for “add video comment.”
Also, did you notice the odd offset in the video playback? For instance, on one video at my site, the video ends, but playback of dead air continues for about 15 seconds longer. In your video above, it starts to fade before you get to finish your sentence. What do you think of that? Also, the volume is so low that even with every setting full blast, you are barely a whisper.
And lastly, what do you think of the Seesmic plugin for comments vs this?
Anyway, thanks for responding! You can contact me directly or just reply here. Thanks!
Troy