Smart media aims to enhance Moodle’s processing and delivery of multimedia while simplifying the process of managing multimedia for teachers and students.

The smart media plugins in Moodle aim to solve the following two user stories:

As a teacher I have a video that works on my local device and I want to make that video available to my students in a suitable format, by adding it to any rich text area in Moodle. Without the need for me to do any other operations on the video apart from uploading to Moodle.

As a student I want to be able to view any video on my chosen device; added to a rich text area in Moodle by a teacher. Regardless of the environment I’m accessing the video or my bandwidth limitations.

Smart media leverages cloud services provided through Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to conduct video transcoding into required formats and provide additional analytics functionality for multimedia.

Source: catalyst/moodle-local_smartmedia: Moodle LMS Smartmedia local plugin