Avalon Media Systems

Some preliminary work has been going on in the Digital Library Programming group to investigate Avalon for use in delivering audio and video content from our Hydra repository. Avalon is an open source software package that was developed by the Hydra partners: Indiana University and Northwestern University. We are considering adopting it for some of our audio/video needs as we consider ingesting audio and video into our Hydra repository.

In the video you will see an instance of Avalon that I have running on a virtual server on my computer. To access, I am using a web browser pointing to the virtual server, the URL only works from my computer. The only customization made to the software was to include a small Yale Library logo in the upper left, otherwise the software is “out of the box” and is bundled with an open source media streaming server. The content in this test instance is delivered as part of the “trial version” of the software so that you can see how it works without investing a lot of time.

The video is just under two minutes and demonstrates browsing to a video and showing playback. I demonstrate some of the basic playback controls including full screen. I then show how the video can be embedded on other web pages for sharing the content. Lastly I demonstrate the most basic type of content restriction where I set the requirement that you must be logged into Avalon in order to view the video. I then reload the web page that I embedded the video onto to demonstrate that I am now required to login. After logging in, the video begins to playback.

The video below is best viewed in full screen, it does not require sound but if you do have speaker or headphones, you will hear the music while the video is playing. (youtube link if the video below does not work)

AvalonSample1

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