Comments on: Digital Lecture Archive now available in MiddLab

By: Ian McBride

Ian McBride — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:28:28 +0000

Right now they’re in the order in which the items were added to the Digital Lecture Archive, descending. The date information for the lectures was being stored in the description instead of the date field. This has since been corrected and Bryan and Richard are working on re-indexing the collection so that the updated information can be re-imported with the date in the correct field.

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:26:01 +0000

I see that I can browse them under Themes – Digital Lecture Archive, but how can I tell the date of the lecture? I can’t really tell what kind of order they are in.

By: Ian McBride

Ian McBride — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:48:53 +0000

Good to hear, Petar. I tried a while back doing some Real Media conversion for a different project using a Windows desktop application. I found that I really couldn’t get the video/audio quality I wanted from them and it wasn’t really worth my time. I hope you fare better.

If the media is hosted on MiddMedia, MiddLab will display an embedded HTML5 (or Flash for IE 7/8) video player instead of a link to otter/muskrat. Hopefully more of our video will be in formats MiddMedia can support going forward.

By: Petar Mitrevski

Petar Mitrevski — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:42:59 +0000

Hi Ian,

Nice addition!

On a somewhat related topic, I’m working on converting all the DLA media to MPEG format (MPEG4 for video, MPEG3 for audio). Doing it in batch with ffmpeg and derivatives is proving less than successful (audio sync issues). I am trying an alternate method that hopefully will work better. It may make sense for the two of us to chat if I succeed (in which case all the media may move to another server).

Petar