BlueStream notes

From openmichigan

Meeting held Monday Oct 6, Brad Gibson, Bob Riddle and Ali Asad Lotia went from the ET Office.

1. They emphasized that BlueStream was not an end-user product. Rather a set of services for managing and processing multimedia.
2. There is a UI, but it is unclear if it can integrate with our workflow and not certain if all the functionality is exposed in through the UI.
3. Excellent support for ACLs, unclear if arbitrary groups can be created. We would likely need such support to create groups of dScribe1/dScribe2 for class/classes.
4. Processes and transcodes video, images of various formats. Automatically creates lower fidelity versions and allows streaming.
5. Grabs key frames and scene transitions from video and allows navigation to those scenes within video.
6. Does speech to text from video, but doesn't create transcripts.
7. Detects text in video (not certain).
8. Unclear what formats are supported. Uses a fair amount of proprietary software so unclear if plugins for new formats can be developed in-house.
9. Support for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF is very sparse at the moment. No disassembly/detection within the file. It is dependent on user contributed metadata. PDF can be supported with addition of additional software from Adobe.
10. Several different APIs to programmatically access all the service offerings instead of a single-unified one. We have docs for their RESTful web services API, but it doesn't provide any way to get files in/out of BlueStream. Mostly deals with metadata.
11. Currently uses a CIFS/SMB mount to add files to the system.
12. Can accept batch uploads and metadata can be stored in an Excel file.
13. Unclear what the associated costs with using BlueStream would be.
14. Not sure if there are static URLs (handles) associated with each asset.
15. Unclear if parent/child relationships can be established between uploaded content. e.g. The COs in a Powerpoint referring to the original file. Will this fit the Course contains Materials contains CO hierarchy?

BlueStream as it would be used in the open.umich initiative is an extensive offering of services to process digital media. The current version is quite skewed towards A/V and provides powerful processing functionality particularly for video. Other commonly used document types such as OpenOffice and MS Office documents are simply stored in the original binary format and BlueStream doesn't process them at present. Any metadata associated with such files needs to be manually entered by the user. Bulk uploads and metadata assignment are possible by putting the metadata in a spreadsheet and uploading it along with the media files. The metadata are extracted from the spreadsheet and associated with the files.