Thought I would kick off this section....

I also would like to suggest introducing something like SWF viewers addtionally (similar to FlashPaper or iPaper) in order to view flash documents that e.g. has been generated by means of SWFTOOLS on the basis of common Microsoft or Open document types.

I'm not a coder, so maybe it would work like this generally :)
-- just add PDF as a new upload document type
-- convert it on the fly via SWFTOOLS at server side and
-- display it via a player that support "next" and "prev" instead of "play"

So Kaltura would be a truly alternative not just for YouTube but also for Scribd, slideshare, edocr and many more. This would be really awesome!

BR, Peer

That's a really interesting idea!

As Open Office can convert Powerpoint Presentation to FLVs, one option would be to take good search through the source code and throw together a standalone function that converts PPTs to FLVs. You could then use SWFTOOLS to convert PDFs, etc. to SWFs.

This might also be helpful:

http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=powerpoint97&sc=302039346

I can't imagine Kaltura doing this internally in the short term to be perfectly honest (they haven't even got the KAE working properly yet!), but I don't see why 3rd party developers couldn't get this happening.

Alternatively, a much simpler way of doing things would be to create an add-on to Powerpoint that automatically exports the presentation as a image sequence, uploads that directly to Kaltura, and creates a remix of the presentation. That way the conversion process is done on the client end instead...

Hi Chris,

I think most work should be done at server side. There are so many users that would be asked too much of exporting, converting a.s.o. :)

To me PDF would be the best basis for an automatic conversion process to a flash based document viewed in a flash based player / reader.

PS: your link http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=powerpoint97&sc=302039346 doesn't work.

Fair enough!

PDF to Kaltura shouldn't be that hard to implement, and you could even do that conversion on your own server (so that you don't have to wait for Kaltura to catch up). The easiest way I can think of would be to convert the PDFs to still image frames using something like ImageMagick. You could then just easily import these still images into Kaltura. You could then use PHP to create a remix which contains all the still images one after the after. I'm not positive, but I also think that you could probably use the current release of the KDP to add "Next" and "Previous" buttons simply by modifying the UIConfig and adding two custom buttons. You'd just need to use some Javascript that tells the KDP to jump to the next section of the remix (which I THINK is possible). Alternatively, you could also probably use a playlist instead. For example:

http://www.kaltura.org/developer-spotlight

...instead of having videos in the playlist, you just have still images.

Of course, if you have any animation, scripts or transitions in your presentation, then they would be ruined. If you wanted to keep them, you'd need to come up with something a lot more high tech!

Here's the link again:

http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?search=powerpoint&button=GO!

This is really interesting as well:

http://www.impatica.com/imp4ppt/

So... the technology certainly exists!

Also very interesting...

http://www.verypdf.com/ppt-converter/index.html

Hi Chris,

ok, but wouldn't it be much easier to convert it to SWF and controlling the SWF frames via a flash player / reader?

As you might know you can convert the PDF files by means of SWFTOOLS w/o combining them to a reader so that you have "pure" SWF frames, like in a slideshow :)

And I would not differ between a flash film and a flash presentation in general. Frames of a film are played in a sequence automatically, frames of a presentation however one by one (optionally with defined pauses).

According to PDF-based Word documents however the flash reader should have addtional features. Due to the fact that they are mostly not in landscape format a zoom-in/out as well as a scrolling functionality (like FlashPaper) would be very useful.

And I would love to have a non-separated mix of media types to be displayed in a playlist while searching for e.g. any tutorial whether it is a film or a step-by-step-film i.e. a "presention" :)

All in all, it would be really fantastic to have this functionality.

As states in the other thread and feature request.
It is possible to upload and manage document files, however, to convert to swf you will need to set-up a special converter server (either using Office or a like) that is capable for the task, then connect it as a new type of batch conversion engine in KalturaCE.

of course , it may be very interested, some professional tool are easy solutions , such as powerpoint converter , pdf converter, image to pdf converter, etc.

If you go here:
http://corp.kaltura.com/video_platform/content_ingestion

You can see that the marketing says:

Kaltura acts as a Digital Asset Management solution, supporting ingestion, transcoding and management workflows for documents. Features include:

* Document upload in multiple formats (MS Office, OpenOffice)
* Conversion of documents into web friendly formats (PDF, SWF), making them available through any browser and not limited to software installation
* Integration of documents and video into Kaltura's PowerPoint widget

However, I cannot find any way to do this in the UI. Anyone have any ideas? Is this really part of the platform?

Thanks,
david

So Kaltura would be a truly alternative not just for YouTube but also for Scribd, slideshare, edocr and many more. This would be really awesome! http://www.powerpointtovideo.net/powerpoint-to-video-conversion.html