Maybe rename "event/episode/media package" to something else

[LukasKalbertodt]

There are a few reasons with the current names:

1. There are multiple names used (event, episode, media package). Sometimes these have specific meanings, but oftentimes they are all used interchangeably. That makes communication more confusing, especially for newcomers to Opencast.

2. The term "event" is very generic and easily confused with the "a happening at some point in time" meaning. In particular, there is not really a good English alternative word for that second meaning. So if we want to talk about an event queue, event-driven architectures, registering an event handler, statistic events; then we have to clarify that we are not talking about an Opencast "event". I've run into this many times before.

3. Almost all user-facing UI (Tobira, LMS, ...) uses the term "Video". Even many in the Opencast community regularly use the term "video" to refer to an Opencast event in daily speech. This adds a fourth term to the mix.

Ideally, we want a single term to unambiguously refer to the Opencast item currently called "event". And ideally it does not conflict with other common programming-lingo (like "event" does). At the very least, for the new API we only want to use one term consistently.

Of course, keeping the current name(s) is less hassle, that's always an argument. Further, finding a good name isn't that straight forward (as the discussion below will surely demonstrate). The most obvious candidate "video" has the disadvantage that an Opencast "event" can be audio-only. Some alternatives like "media" are problematic for plurals.

Previous discussions:

• Discuss: remaining topics #3 (comment)
• 2025-05-22

[LukasKalbertodt]

My personal take: "video" is totally fine, even if we have audio-only stuff.¹ It's the term most people intuitively use anyway. And almost all user-facing UI. I also don't think it's a problem that we can have multiple video tracks (e.g. presenter and presentation), because... see what I just did there? I called them "video tracks", a well-established term in Opencast for exactly that thing. Same with video stream.

Cleansing us from all the mess before and going with "video" would be my preferred option.

¹ ^{Have you ever worked with GitHubs API? They generalize issues and pull requests as "issues"...}

[mtneug]

My take:

• Use mediapackage internally / for technical aspects, e.g. APIs. This, to me, describes what this actually is in the best way. However, this is somewhat of a technical name and thus not preferable in UIs. But this has a plural form.
• Use media in UIs. Media is the most encompassing but still specific enough term for what we do. Well, maybe multimedia would be more correct, but shorter is better, I guess. It is well-established in the broader industry, and users have an intuitive understanding.