For some time, I have been working on a content delivery application called Senpai (the application was designed with education related scenarios in mind - hence the name). The plan is to create a complete system, one component of which would let you package your video (lectures, product info, ads, hands-on-guide, etc) along with slides (basically HTML pages), transcripts, FAQ, and the other component would bring all these items together and present them to the end user. The basic skeleton of the end-user component is ready, and is at quite a “demoable” stage. There are a few remaining hacks which is needed for the FAQ renderer - and I plan to do those within the next few weeks. The application is “network friendly”, ie. it can access files across networks (using either http, or ftp, or scp), while the video playback mechanism can handle streaming video. It was designed with thin-clients in mind, and it works fine on LTSP nodes (with network transparent video as well as audio). For handling video, I am using Xine (with the option to switch to GStreamer if needed), while for the HTML rendering, I am using Gecko (yeah - the same thing which is used in Mozilla). It is uses GTK2 and also makes significant use of GNOME-only technologies (Gconf, libgnome, libgnomeui, gnome-vfs etc). However, the file format is plain and simple XML (with publicly available DTDs), so anyone can build a clone for his/her favourite platform/desktop.



Future plans include support for interaction with the instructer/lecturer/whoever did the presentation (maybe via Jabber??), integration with Kino, etc. Suggestions are welcome.

At present I am cleaning up the code and removing the profanity (hehe..), and I’ll probably release the code (under the GPL) sometime during November.