*************** WARNING: Heavy geek content ***************

During the recording of this week's Tightwad Tech podcast, which will be released on Thursday, both of the guests on the show mentioned a product called Kaltura frequently and glowingly.  So being the geek that I am, I had to check it out. 

First..the name.  Can we just stipulate that from now on anything tech-related, be it hardware or software is going to have a goofy, off-the-wall name? JooJoo, Kin, Zoho, Yahoo!, Google, Wordle, iPad, Yfrog… seriously, what's with these names? It's all about what domain names are available, right?

The easiest way to describe Kaltura is to say it's an in-house YouTube.  However, the easiest way to describe something isn't necessarily the best way to describe it, and this is the case with Kaltura.  It's really more like a wiki for video, audio, and photographic content; but just because it's easier, when I say "Kaltura," think "YouTube on my very own server."

There are two version of Kaltura- a paid-for, hosted version and a fully open source, no-cost "community" version.  This write-up will focus on the latter because…well, because I'm a cheapskate. 

INSTALLATION: Kaltura runs on any "AMP" stack, which means the core components of what it needs to run are the Apache web server, the MySQL database engine, and support for the PHP scripting language.  This can be done on a Windows, Linux, or Apple server and the Web site contains documentation which at least mentions all three.  Being a fan of Linux the first thing I did was roll out a fresh Ubuntu Linux installation on my VMWare Sever.

Having done that I headed over to the Kaltura.org Web site, downloaded the Community Edition, unzipped it onto my machine and began to read the "Getting Started Guide."   Which told me I first had to create the MySQL database, which I did using my favorite Swiss Army Knife of the server world- Webmin.  Then I went to http://127.0.0.1/kalturaCE on the local machine and followed the instructions on the screen.

That's really about it.  I know for the non-geek who may have survived reading this far that may sound daunting, but if you're the kind of person who's actually going to be installing Kaltura, you're thinking "Hey, that's pretty easy!" and it is.

POKING AROUND:  Of course installation is only the first step in getting to know any new software.  After you get it up and running, you actually have to do something with it. 

Once you finish the installation you're presented with a few different screens, none of which have a whole lot of information on it.  After a couple of minutes I had my first video uploaded and converted to a Flash video complete with a dizzying array of sharing options from the usual "embed" link, to the ability to send it to Facebook, to an option to email a link to my friends and much, much, much more.

However, this is all with my "Administrator" login.  If I'm going to use this at my school I need to be able to let students and teachers upload files to this thing and share them out without seeing all the servery goodness that an admin sees.  So, I headed over to the Community Edition documentation and did a search on creating additional users, and was promptly directed to the Application Programming Interface specification where I could write my own routine to do just that!

Um…peachy.

Fortunately, as a result of the previously mentioned podcast interview, I knew that there was a Moodle add-on to do this very thing.  I found the plug-in on the Kaltura site and installed it on my Moodle in "the usual way," and was ready to go.  Now my teachers can upload videos into our Moodle, which are automatically converted to Flash videos and added as Moodle resources. 

If you're a Moodle user, that last sentence just blew your mind. 

The plug-in also allows teachers to create an assignment which requires students to upload their own videos right into the Moodle- all with the bevvy of sharing options I mentioned before.

So, even if you don't want to give people access to your Moodle course, you can use it as a front-end for uploading media files and then use the built-in sharing tools to distribute it.

There's also a Joomla plug-in which, in theory, allows you to upload a video right into a Joomla article as easily as you would a video or PDF document.  I say "in theory" because I haven't actually made that part work yet.  I've seen it on other people's Joomla installations, but it just doesn't work on mine.  I'll chalk that up to something non-standard about the way I have mine set up.

CONCLUSION: If you're a tech weenie who's understood everything I've written above, and you host a Moodle, or Joomla or Drupal, or WordPress installation, then you really owe it to yourself to check out Kaltura.  It's pretty amazing.  If not, just watch the funny video below, which was created by students and is hosted on our Kaltura installation.

UPDATE:  Thanks to the hard work of some good people in the Kaltura community I was able to find the tweaks necessary to get Kaltura working in my Joomla install.  I'm posting it here for my own use and in the hopes that it might be useful to others as well.  Edit the table "jos_kaltura_config" so that the relevant values are as follows.  Leave the other values in the table alone because, frankly, I have no idea what they do.  If you're using a Moodle, these values need to be changed in the "mdl_config_plugins" table.