Today we learned that educational media viewers and educators at UCLA won a legal battle over streaming copyrighted video. The federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by a educational media group of California over the legality of streaming copyrighted videos on secure course websites  (learning ma... [More]

The IT staff and a nursing department at an innovative college in Georgia are doing more with less. How? They are using Polycom videoconferencing equipment to concurrently teach nursing courses across multiple campuses and using Ensemble Video to provide 24x7 on-demand access to recorded conferenc... [More]

It has been almost 5 years since version 1.0 of Ensemble Video, and in that time we have continually improved and refined our rich media management solutions into a set of cohesive, high value offerings that can help any organization effectively manage its rich media content. Currently, Ensemble Vid... [More]

The Ensemble Video default Flash-based player is called the Flowplayer, and there is a commercial version of this that you can use with Ensemble Video to brand your video content with your institution’s logo. ABC. The commercial Flowplayer allows you to add a graphic logo in the upper right hand co... [More]

Once your Ensemble Video System Administrator implements system-wide custom Preview and Thumbnail images, then when you manage audio, animation, and other media types, where no preview or thumbnail can be extracted, you’ll see branding for your institution rather than the Ensemble Video logo. ABC. ... [More]

Jing is a cool screen capture tool popular among educators and IT trainers in higher education as well as K-12. The FREE version creates SWF files which technically aren’t video files, and they need to be uploaded to a Web server to be viewable. ABC.  Jing is a simple, easy-to-use screen captu... [More]

If you have media files that are behaving badly on playback, you may want to use a program like GSpot to look into the file details. ABC. Occasionally, we hear from users who are creating and uploading MP4 files to Ensemble Video (without transcoding), and find that they play back in the ... [More]

Scott Nadzan, IT director at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, shared some recent test results that show how new desktop hardware can reduce time to encode, and significantly ease the ‘pain’ of encoding in the process.  ABC. Scott Nadzan Scott ran a cool encoding test, out... [More]

Categories can provide a useful means for organizing access to content when you are publishing a lot of videos to an embedded video library.  ABC. To publish to any Ensemble Video Web destination you must choose a Category in the Sharing form in the Add/Edit wizard. There is a single “Default ... [More]

Joel Steinfeldt, Media Communications Specialist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, recently shared with me the details of how to use YouTube transcription and closed caption functions with Ensemble Video (Thanks, Joel!). ABC. Joel Steinfeldt Joel has experimented with YouTube’s ... [More]