Category

Software Service

Description

For audio and video files

Audio and video are being used for educational purposes more and more. Moving images are used to clarify and enliven classes. Another reason for using video in (higher) education is its possibility to watch classes and meetings live or on-demand. Moreover, audio and video play an increasingly big part for several disciplines of research, such as social and medical sciences. SURFmedia, SURFnet's on-line media platform, makes this all possible in a simple way.
The service comprises a Multimedia centre, Live (the former RTV guide) and Community & Support. The Multimedia centre contains a large collection of audiovisual material, from higher education itself and from external content suppliers, such as the Dutch Institute for Picture and Sound. With Live students, teachers and researchers can watch and create live broadcasts. In Community & Support, knowledge on the use of streaming media in higher education can be exchanged. FAQ's, how to's and the helpdesk can also be found here.

Features

• Connection to SURFfederation - it is possible to log on with a personal federated account
• Standard free 1 GB for uploading media files
• Possibility to personally put together collections of files
• Advanced possibilities to screen audio and video files
• Extensive search options
• Well-organised presentation of audiovisual materials by using metadata and flash previews
• RSS feeds when new files have become available
• Possibility  to set up a live broadcast

Target Audience

• End users of Dutch Educational Institutes

Conditions for use

• The service is available to students, teachers and researchers in higher education and research.
• Users can upload up to 1GB of video free of charge

Language

• Dutch

More information

• See: www.surfmedia.nl
• Contact: help@surfmedia.nl

Category Service

Software (open source)

Description

MediaMosa is a Full Featured, Webservice Oriented Media Management and Distribution platform.

MediaMosa is a state-of-the-art, scalable Middleware Media Distribution Platform and facilitates access to, and usage of (shared) storage capacity, metadata databases, transcoding- and streaming servers. The platform offers functionality for searching, playing, uploading, transcoding, as well as a fine granularity media access control system towards its users. MediaMosa is based on the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture and is designed to support content streaming applications by providing a back-end-, audio- and video-infrastructure.

Features

• Delivery platform for audio, video (and other content)
• Streaming of any format (e.g. Flash, H.264 MPEG-4 and WindowsMedia)
• Transcoding based on FFmpeg
• Flexible Metadata Element Sets
• Open Source under GPLv2 license

Conditions for use

• MediaMosa is a free and open software package. It is based on the Drupal CMS and supports the use of several other Open Source software such as FFmpeg
• Open source under the GPLv2 license

Language

• English

More information

• See www.mediamosa.org
• Forum: http://mediamosa.org/forum
• Code SVN: http://mediamosa.org/trac/browser
• Presentations (SlideShare): http://tinyurl.com/ybnyecr* Contact: help@surfmedia.nl

Category

Service

Description

SURFnet takes the video conferencing service to a higher plan, as the target group indicated that they wished for higher quality. Since 1 March 2009, there is the possibility to set up a video conference in HD quality. This is especially interesting for health care institutions, where you have to see for example what is happening during an operation. These institutions already applied for SURFcontact.

Video conferencing offers institutions for higher education and research distinct time and efficiency benefits. Still, this means of communication is not used often, which could be solved when professional users in higher education, research and health care would use HD video conferencing equipment. Research shows that the quality of the information is incomparably higher, even so that communication with HD video conferencing can be compared to face-to-face contact

Features

SURFcontact enables users from institutions that are connected to SURFnet and have an SIP or H323 videoconferencing end point to:

• reach each other easily, both internationally and nationally
• set up a video conference in HD quality for more than two people at the same time
• book and monitor video conferencing sessions easily through a web portal
• get support during office hours
• to channel traffic when firewalls prove to be a hindrance

Goal/Mission

Conditions for use

Institutions that pay for SURFcontact can set up several guest and/or demo institutions, so the other party is not obliged to purchase this service from SURFnet. 

For guest users of the video conferencing service, other conditions apply.

Language

• Dutch

More information

• More information can be found on www.surfcontact.nl (in Dutch).

Category

Research initiative (project)

Description

Cinegrid

Description

CineGrid
Digital cinema

CineGrid is an international research initiative that was established to promote research, development and deployment of new distributed applications of ultra-high performance digital media (sound and picture) over advanced networks, using Grid computing technologies for networked collaboration.

Features

The CineGrid project will combine the state-of-the-art visual and audio recording technologies along with high-speed photonic networks and ultra sharp projection facilities to record and deliver very high quality moving images and sound across continents. The resulting impression is overwhelming and resembles that of being present at a live performance. The technology is called "4K" after the number of horizontal pixels in the image, 4096x2160 per frame; four times that of High Definition Television and equivalent to 35 MM film. A one-and-a-half-hour recording before compression contains roughly 3.5 Terabytes of data – the amount of data that fits on about 1.200 DVD's. Sound will also be in very high quality, with 24 channels uncompressed audio for much richer sound than normal audio CD recordings.

Goal/Mission

To build an interdisciplinary community that is focused on the research, development, and demonstration of networked collaborative tools to enable the production, use and exchange of very-high-quality digital media over photonic networks.

Conditions for use

See: http://www.cinegrid.org/index.php?option=com_content

Language

• English
• Dutch

Conditions for use

More information

• http://www.cinegrid.org/
• http://www.waag.org/project/cinegrid