DrewTube
DrewTube was created as a marketing piece to fit in with our new website design. The idea was to try to catch some of the lightning-in-a-bottle that is YouTube and use it to make some video marketing material available to prospective students.
Internally DrewTube is handled by Ektron CMS400.Net. The page itself is a blog, with each entry being a Smart Form (structured data in XML format) instead of the standard content block (basic HTML data).
To turn the XML data into pages, we use a set of XSLT sheets. The XSLT transforms the XML into an HTML page, even inserting the appropriate code to generate our flash player.
The flash player component I developed for this project is built to work along the YouTube model: one player handling multiple videos. Modifying the standard Flash FLVPlayback object (which gives us the basic play/stop/seek functionality), our player takes in a file name as a parameter, loads that file for playback, and then letterboxes itself to match the video file. You can see these adjustments take place on any of the widescreen video segments.
Because the Flash Video Encoder is so limited, and because we wanted to streamline the process, I made a simple command-line program for Windows that uses FFMPEG (a free open-sourced video encoder) to automatically produce a thumbnail, the flash video, and a quicktime/h264 video for inclusion in a podcast.
The podcast is made available from the main DrewTube page by clicking on the RSS icon. Summer plans include developing a header image for DrewTube pages that gives them some identity while also pushing the podcast to the forefront.
For more information, please see the DrewTube page at http://www.drew.edu/discoverdrew/drewtube.aspx.