Alfresco as a repository for broadcast Advertisements

[apoorvdurga]

We are proposing Alfresco for building a content repository for serving Ads to broadcasters. So essentially there will be people who upload ads along with metadata in different formats - Audio, Video, Flash etc. The idea is that the ad player device will interact with alfresco using web services or the new Rest API to run these ads and upload information related to ad statistics.

I have the following questions and am hoping someone will give me good pointers here:

1. The system need the ability to encode video and audio files to different format. I know there's imagemagik for image encoding but is there anything for encoding videos and audios? Anything external that we can integrate with?

2. We need to have our own user roles and permissions. For example, An "Advertiser" can add "Player" types on which a specific ad can be displayed. Is there an easy way to achieve this?

3. DIfferent Asset Types required are Ad Player, Ads, Contracts etc. I'm planning to use Alfresco WCM's custom content types. Is that a good way or should i use some other mechanism?

4. Some kind of reporting on the types of ads, their duration etc.

Any pointers will be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Best,
/a

[apoorvdurga]

No replies was it such a bad question?

[kevinr]

1) You can add a custom transformer class to do this using the usual APIs. I suggest a quick search of SourceForge to see if there any Java or command line tools that can do this for you. There are examples of transformers that call command line programs (i.e. Imagemagik) so that is certainly possible.

2) Yes you can add your own roles/permissions by customising the model/permissionDefinitions.xml file - see the section in the file:
<!– Permissions available to all content and folders –>
for our existing role definitions.

3) I guess that depends on how you are going to use the objects.

4) If you add custom meta-data to your types/aspects that represent those documents then you can use Lucene search and Freemarker templates to generate reports on those items. You could add a custom meta-data extractor class that can read the formats you create and extra data from them as meta-data. An example of this is the MP3MetadataExtracter we have now.

Thanks,

Kevin