Video Server

From School Computing

Retrieved from ISED-L list-serv 9/08, CC3.0 a, s-a, nc license

One option is the video sharing option in Google education.

However, to do it yourself, you could do this:

Purchase a server capable of serving video for a school: 3000.00

Install and configure ffmpeg, an open source video encoder: 10 hours.

Install and configure Drupal with either the media mover or the flashvideo modules: 30 hours for a basic install, 60 with a learning curve. In a school setting, it makes a lot of sense to have students be a central parr of this work.

Additional tweaking (not necessary, but the kind of experimenting/refinement that usually happens): 50 hours (ballpark), spread over weeks among individuals.

Server and web site maintenance: 5 hrs/month

So, for 3k, an initial time investment of 40 to 70 person hours (ie, this could be split among a group), and a small amount of monthly maintenance, a school could create its own youtube clone. This site would be entirely under the school's control, and would not subject minors to the data mining which is a clearly stated "cost" of google services. Additionally, within the school, building this project could be covered as part of the curriculum.

For a school of 300 students, this system is competitively priced to what Google offers -- I don't know if that 10/user number is per month or per year, but assuming its per year a school of 300 students would pay Google 3k, or the cost of the server. After 1 year, the open source solution begins to save money, on top of it's privacy and educational benefits. And please, any and all systems experience downtime, even if they're run by Google: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/google-app-engine-goes-down-and-stays-down/

Drupal is available at http://drupal.org; the Media Mover module is available at http://drupal.org/project/media_mover; FlashVideo is available at http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo