Presented by Michael B. Klein and Nathan Rogers at the 2013 Code4Lib conference in Chicago, IL, on February 12, 2013.

1. The Avalon Media System
A Next Generation Hydra Head for
Audio and Video Delivery

2. Demo!

3. Legos? Really?
What is Avalon?
Integration with:
• ILS
• LMS
Shhh!
• Websites
• Authn/Authz
• Archival Storage
Black Hat Guy and Megan from xkcd by Randall Munroe. Used under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

4. Project Partners and Collaborators

5. Development Team

6. Content Processing with Matterhorn
§ Workflow pipeline
§ Pingbacks for status updates
§ Caching of key metadata / images

7. Opencast Matterhorn
“ Matterhorn is a free, open-source platform to
support the management of educational
audio and video content. Institutions will use
Matterhorn to produce lecture recordings,
manage existing video, serve designated
distribution channels, and provide user
interfaces to engage students with
educational videos.”

8. HTTP Upload Batch
or Ingest
File Drop
Content
Status
Matterhorn workflow
How does content get prepared for
delivery by Avalon?

9. Batch/Unattended Ingest

10. Encoding profiles
Customized encoding profiles for mobile
and desktop streaming

11. Status updates
Between every conversion step Matterhorn
tells Avalon to ask for an update

12. Caching of key data
§ Poster thumbnails
§ Fedora datastreams for technical metadata
§ Solr indices for resource discovery

13. Robust Access Controls
Customizable rules for discovery and
access.

14. Stream security
§ Institutional needs
§ Tokenized authentication
§ RTMP streaming
§ HTTP Live Streaming

15. RTMP
Streaming
HTTP Dynamic/
Live Streaming
Institutional needs
Different streaming formats for desktop
and mobile users

16. Tokenized authentication
Auth Token
Media Package ID
838f1b90-0c4f-4eaf-b3fc-4368587f1b8e-af2fad299000fc841d40db30793560ea
Request Stream Details
Return Stream URL + Auth Token
ID
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17. RTMP Streaming
Flash based player for desktops and full
featured platforms

18. HTTP Live Streaming
§ Mobile fallback to a
standard HTML5
video container
§ Dynamic
segmentation with
Adobe Media Server
§ Pre-rendered segments to support other HTTP
servers (e.g., Apache, lighttpd, nginx)

19. Back to the demo!

20. Learn more
Bi-weekly demos
http://go.iu.edu/6Q1
Project site
http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/
Source code repository
https://github.com/variations-on-video/
User stories, tasks, and bugs
https://bugs.dlib.indiana.edu/browse/VOV
URLs. Yay.

21. Thank you!
Michael B. Klein Nathan Rogers
michael.klein@northwestern.edu rogersna@indiana.edu