OpenEdit DAM Blog and News

EnterMedia Release Notes for March 2010, more Video Support

Julie Riley — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:09:11 GMT

Release notes for EnterMedia Media Asset Management

March 12, 2010 - EnterMedia 6.706

New Video Player

EnterMedia is now using FlowPlayer (flowplayer.org) to better support previewing of video assets. If you upload a video, EnterMedia will now generate:
1. A series of still thumbnails to be displayed on results pages. If you hover your mouse over the thumbnail of a video, it will begin to
cycle through this series of still images.
2. A flash version of the video for previewing. By clicking on the thumbnail you will be taken to the Media Viewer page where you will be
able to watch the entire flash version of the video!
3. Ability to import from YouTube or external URL to an asset or video file

Note: Generating thumbs and flash versions of videos requires ffmpeg (ffmpeg.org) to be installed and configured correctly to work with EnterMedia. For more information on this, see our installation
instructions here: http://entermediasoftware.com/docs/ApendixA/index.html

User Interface

The application has a new nicer looking header and easier navigation. In an effort to simplify our results page, we have removed all of the icons displayed under thumbnails. This gives a cleaner appearance and allows us to fit more thumbnails on a single results page. All of the actions that were previously available via icons below thumbnails are not available on the Media Viewer page, which is accessed by clicking on any thumbnail.

We also changed our image hover functionality. Previously the enlarged hover image would follow your mouse around until your pointer left the thumbnail. Apparently people found this irritating, so we changed it! The hover will now stay centered above the thumbnail and shows the item name and selection groups. For anyone who is still annoyed by the image hover functionality, you can set your preferred view to "Gallery-No Hover". See "View Settings" below for information on setting your view preferences.

Security Improvements
Catalogs now has asset and folder level security enabled by default. Also improved the security editor on the catalog settings page.

Collections
Assets can now be added to groups of collections. A collection gives you a way to show off your best or most recent assets.

View Settings
We also removed the hits-per-page, view, and sorting dropdowns from the results header. These settings are now accessible from the "view" button in the results header. This button will give you a pop-up which allows you to set your results view preferences based on the type of results you are seeing: Category (browsing), Search, Album, or Selection.

Selecting Improvements
The new clipboard groups are designed to help users sort their media. Once you have added a group of similar items into a clipboard group, you can then categorize or keyword all of those items at once using multi-edit, or you can add the items to a posting to share it with your friends. We have tried to make these clipboard a little easier to use so that everyone can take full advantage of their capabilities. To that end, we have added Drag and Drop functionality! From a results page, you can now drag and drop a thumbnail into a clipboard group box to add that item. You can also add a single item to a selection group using the check boxes that appear in the hover image, or you can add an entire page of results to a selection group by clicking the "Clipboards" button in the results header.

Share with Facebook
We have added a button on the Media Viewer page that will share an item with Facebook!

Voting
From the MediaViewer page, you can now click the star button to indicate that you like that photo/video/whatever. You can even see a list of other users who like a given item.

New Uploader
We have a new, fancier-than-ever upload applet. You can now upload multiple items, or even an entire folder, all at once. EnterMedia will immediately create assets for each item being uploaded, allowing you to begin sorting or editing the meta-data associated with your uploads. You will see an indicator in the top-right corner showing your current uploads. You can click on this indicator to see the progress of your current uploads. Thumbnails will be created for your new assets as the uploads complete. (You will need to be navigating around the site, or at least refreshing your page before you will actually see the images.)

Download EnterMedia

Visit the EnterMedia website entermediasoftware.com

Use EnterMedia to centralize, approve, publish and collaborate all of your digital media!

Using REST API to integrate EnterMedia with other applications

Julie Riley — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:59:17 GMT

We have received several requests from users who are interested in using EnterMedia through other applications. Below is one client's question and our response how the integration might be done.

Question: We want to use EnterMedia for the following tasks through our application:

·Retrieve a list of Categories and Create Categories in EnterMedia

·Retrieve a list of values for a Field

·Create Fields In a Category

·Search for Assets to return a list of Assets (including Metadata specified dynamically) based on Catalog, Category, Field

·Upload Asset to a Catalog and also apply categories and other metadata to the Asset

A java based Web service might work for us but we are open to suggestions. The input and output parameters for the calls are an xml (the schema for the xml is not developed yet so we are open to suggestions on this).

EnterMedia Response: While we don't have a full webservice we do have a REST API. I think you'll be able to use our new REST API to accomplish all of your goals. As I said the API is new, so as of right now you can only get a list of catalogs and a list of all of the assets in a catalog. We will be adding a lot more to the API in the near future, and I think we'll be able to meet all of your requests.

There is some sparse documentation at http://entermediasoftware.com/docs/rest/index.html. In our examples, we use jQuery to send HTML requests to the server and to parse responses from the server. This could be done in Java, but we used jQuery because it's quick and easy. If you would like an example of a Java client, let us know and we'll see what we can do. If you would like to add to the API yourselves, I encourage you look at the source code and ask us any questions that you have.

EnterMedia integrates with Episode by Telestream

Julie Riley — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:00:19 GMT

Using Episode by Telestream, EnterMedia has created a custom video transcoding and publishing solution to support large amounts of video data that needed to be in the correct formats and in the correct places. EnterMedia handles the ingestion of the original assets and then delegates to Episode to prepare various video files in several different formats. When those transcodes are complete, EnterMedia will pull down the resulting video files and push them out to various streaming servers for use on the corporate network. Embedding code can then be provided so employees can add the videos to various web pages across the enterprise.

The basic flow is something like this:

New Video -> Uploaded to EnterMedia -> Transfered to Episode for metadata extraction and transcoding to various formats -> Output captured by EnterMedia and published to streaming servers.

We can also push videos on demand into Episode for transcoding.

EnterMedia is an online digital asset management application that connects to your website to display and organize your video content.

REST API using JQuery for EnterMedia

Julie Riley — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:41:30 GMT

EnterMedia now has the beginnings of a REST API using JQuery. Here is the start to the API we will have: http://entermediasoftware.com/docs/rest/index.html This XML based API is modeled after the Flickr API. We use jQuery since it easy to manipulate the resulting HTML with it. In the next steps we will show some search and edit examples.

As of right now, we have only implemented retrieving the list of catalogs in EnterMedia, but it should be easy to extend and we plan on adding much more to the API in the near future. The following is an example where we load the generated catalog list into the selected DIV:

Client Side

Server Side

The server side is located in the entermedia/services/rest folder. Each client action has to match an xml file of the same name. For example in our above code we use 'listcatalogs' which corresponds to entermedia/services/rest/listcatalogs.xml.

EnterMedia Digital Asset Management December 2009 Release

Julie Riley — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:52:58 GMT

OpenEdit Inc., is pleased to announce the latest release of open source EnterMedia digital asset management software. Version 6.536 was released December 17, 2009. Download EnterMedia v.6.536.

We try to release a new version of EnterMedia each month. Most of the features are corporate sponsored ones, which are then shared with everyone who downloads EnterMedia.

Release Notes, December 17, 2009:

Social Networking Features:
We have added several new features bringing social networking capabilities to EnterMedia. Each user will now have their own user page, from which they can Upload a portrait, add or remove friends, and create, view, or share their albums.
We have also redesigned the Home page to help you keep track of recent activity from your friends. Currently you will see notifications when a friend creates or comments on an album.

New Album Interface:
We've cleaned up our album interface and included album comments on the main album page.

New Events System:
We have implemented a new system to allow you to create your own events that can run java code or scripts. These are stored as _site.xconf files within subfolders inside of the "events" folder. You can then schedule these events to run on a timer or have your pages call these events. Events are managed from their own tab in the catalog administration area (Choose a catalog from the "Edit Catalogs" dropdown in the admin/settings area).

Mounting/Importing:
We have simplified the process for importing new assets from your server. From the import screen in the admin/settings area, you can select a catalog and enter a local (server-side) path and import your assets without having to worry about configuring the mount yourself.
For users that are using mounting for other purposes, you can still access the mounting tool, also in the admin/settings area. This area has been simplified to reflect the separation of mounting and importing.

Clear Invalid Assets:
A new feature that goes hand-in-hand with mounting and importing. This action will check all of the assets within a catalog and remove any assets whose original file no longer exists. This will allow you to keep your catalogs synchronized with your importing folder.

View EnterMedia release notes from the past six months.

About EnterMedia:
Open source EnterMedia software, is a 100% web-based, digital asset management system, used by Fortune 1000 corporations and organizations. EnterMedia, developed by OpenEdit Inc., is used primarily by the creative services industry, marketing departments and firms needing a centralized repository to share, collaborate, track, manage and reuse creative media content.

OpenEdit installs easily on OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

Licensed under a royalty free, perpetual and transferable GNU LGPL license, OpenEdit is free to download and use, including all upgrades.

For more information about EnterMedia open source digital asset management software, please visit entermediasoftware.com