European Society of Radiology – Archive Presentation System
During my temporary placement at netkey.at, I developed a video presentation system in Flash. Complex features were implemented such as ‘virtual’ streaming using a php script and thumbnail generation using XML. A full description and system prototype is available.
Before I was accepted as an intern at the IAEA, I took a short placement at a private IT solutions company in Vienna called ‘netkey.at‘. Their key customer is the European Society of Radiology (ESR) as they organize all IT solutions for their annual conference, European Congress of Radiology (ECR), at the Austria Centre.
This project allowed me to find out what separates me from an average computer user in a real world working environment. The aim was to develop an effective presentation system that featured two video objects. One screen showing the video of the speaker and the other showing the screen capture of the presentation.
At that time in 2007, youtube did not yet provide the ability to skip forward to undownloaded parts of the video. With research, I managed to find out a solution by injecting extra meta data to the video file and using a PHP script to process the video as if it were streaming. As opposed to progressive downloading, where you have to wait for the rest of the content to finish downloading before viewing it.
I managed to implement this technique into the project and it works succesfully.
Another technical feature that I implemented is using XML to add cue points to the videos and to pull out the appropriate thumbnail for each chapter button.
Overall the system has many complex functions but there were several bugs that I did not manage to overcome during the short time frame that I worked for netkey.at. The most significant bug is that both video objects do not successfully synchoronize with each other 100% of the time.
Although my aim was to develop the presentation system, I was not responsible for designing the interface. My former boss and founder of the company, Oliver Walland, was more curious about my abilities in programming innovative solutions in Flash.
I was very happy to hear that I have exceeded his expectations by providing him a working prototype. The application is avialable for you to try out by clicking the following link: ECR – Archive Presentation System
