Optaros Labs

Here’s yet another great demo from my colleague Jeff Potts. This time it’s an integration of Alfresco with Kaltura, the open source video management, mashup, browser-based editing, and viewing platform. This would let you use Alfresco workflow with video assets, and then publish them to Kaltura for distribution outside the organization.

(We’re using a Kaltura CDN and player here, so the full screen icon is the four arrows pointing out toward the corners, just to the right of the volume icon).

There’s a custom view in the Alfresco web client property sheet, which embeds FlowPlayer to watch videos in Alfresco spaces, as well as “publish to Kaltura” link which pushes videos from Alfresco into Kaltura for distribution, using the Kaltura API. Once videos are published to Kaltura, the custom view is updated to use the Kaltura version rather than the FlowPlayer.

The project lives here in the Kaltura community: Alfresco – Kaltura Integration

Here’s a quick (<2:30) screencast showing the basic functionality of Facebook Connect Social Shopping, a Magento Extension Optaros developed and released under an open source license. (Click the fullscreen icon to see it in a more legible size).

What do you think?

What’s holding retailers back from letting users get reviews from their social graph, not just from random strangers?

What would you like to see in future releases?

The folks at Automattic rolled out an upgrade this week to the video quality of videos hosted on WordPress.com blogs using their VideoPress service.

The upgrade adds support for HD as well as other formats, using automated transcoding (see the announcement for more info):

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded . . . on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

I’m very happy – as all content creators and consumers should be – to see support for Miro as well as iTunes, along with the classic ease-of-use you’d expect from the hosted services at WordPress.com.

Taking it one step further, though, Automattic has released as open source the entire framework they’re using to manage uploaded videos, transcode them to additional formats, and serve them to consuming sites. This isn’t your average consumer-grade WordPress plugin, though, as they warn in the description:
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