Drupal Transmission Sprint 2009 uk

Background

This started a long long time ago when talking about the possibilities of having a website that published, aggregated and displayed Video in an off the shelf CMS. Not an unrealistic goal you would have thought but since 2007 we are still chipping away trying to do it bit by it in Drupal. Here's a bit of timeline.

Summer 2007

Rome meeting - Aims identified

October 2007

London Transmission meeting - szczym and green man and mori on board to create new ifiwatch.tv site Here is a summary of the working practice of aggregation using Drupal 4.7 and an engine of Simple Pie (deprecated)

Winter 2008

Amsterdam Transmission meeting - ekes on board to try to do the same kind of thing with Drupal 5/6

Summer 2008

Work continues - new aggregation possibilities using Feed API and Element mapper

Fall 2008

Ecobee working on a local news site with Mick - using Media mover and JW player to work with aggregated and imported video and presenting them in the same ways.

Spring 2009

Attempt to document what has been done so far and to collaborate on new ways of doing Video in Drupal

Aims and Outline

16-19th April - Wiltshire

Drupal Video Documentation Mini Sprint

The aims are to evaluate ways of aggregating and displaying video using Drupal and document the process for other developers and users of Drupal sites. Specifically we will aim to document;

• Creating a video content type using Embedded Media CCK
• Transcoding uploaded video
• Displaying your video contents using views and media players
• Aggregating video content using Feed Api (and feed api mapper)
• How to best syndicate your video content

By the end of the weekend we'll have an outline of the pro and cons of different approaches for each of these tasks, and will have created step by step documentation for one currently reccomended path. Drupal video documentation

We'll also have some ideas for the best way forward, and hopefully some interesting suggestions for the future. Drupal video experimentation

Inicial Areas for investigation

Mapping existing documentation in the area of Video sharing

subtitles

Documentations Where do we put our Documentation

We need to create 3 type of documentation

• for developers
• for admins of our drupal site
• for end users

We are planning on putting these in three places.

• Drupal.org
• Floss manuas
• as generic help on the website and input forms of the site.

User Interface

Plan to map out the analysis as a spreadsheet by section.

Create a User interface focus group to look at ifiwatch.net and chalktalk.info and a third site to see how the text and usablility can be improved - feed these ideas back to the techs to work out the vialblity of the ideas.

Transcoding: Media Mover

A short guide to media mover for a video sharing site A group to look at reattaching content to drupal nodes after being used in Media mover FTPing in Media mover

Aggregation: Feedmapper api - and Element Mapper

Documenting

Embedded Media Field: (CCK)

Creating a Provider for our own sites to use the flash elements of Embedded Media Field. This could be a job for Metadata standard

Short Term: Analyse and describe problem of not having out own provider. Write a patch for Media RSS feeds to work - and document it.

Providers

Description:

What we want: Embedded Media Field allows users to post a URL into the field which stores the metadata of the video and locatation, what format it is in and resolution.

It then has different theme functions which then embed this information in a page a 'click and view' player (which is different for each provider) this might be for the big - it might be their own player for someone like Youtube.

The embedded media field is designed to take the URL of the page - there is no standard way of doing this. We don't have anything which allows the EMF to read the data it needs from the page.

What we can do is to map a Media RSS feed to the Embed Media Field for feeds. Using Feed API

At the moment once you have got the the location of video mapped to the EMF then the ways of displaying it are a bit crap.

We also needs a patch to make it work nicely for the mapping side of it. This patch is described here. Media Enclosure parser patch

It will make possible to turn working solution of mapping into default mapping of future content.

2 situations

If we can write a provider to map a URL, then we wouldn't need to be able to map the enclosure elements.

But if we do want to include other information and not just the embedded media stuff like the mp4 files, then we need to be able to intelligently parse various parts of the feed to the Embed Media Field and to pull them out using different theme functions.

Media RSS 2.0 type feeds and Embed Media Field

For media rss type feeds which just include a link to a media file these need to be mapped to draw out a frame work.

Media players

Document the use of SWF tools for a video sharing site and JW player JW player and

Torrents in Drupal and RSS feeds

Time - Sat Evening

short and long term solutions.

Short Term - existing workign torrents can be uploaded as a file attachment to a node and included as RSS feeds

Media api - Drupal 7 The future

Sunday - We can do this

Future Goals as a Transmission Drupal group

We can do this informally

Subtitles - Documentation and the future

Ben to do a test - and as part of mapping

Test site - http://drupal6subs.ben.bzzz.net

Drupal Video Sharing recipe

Goal to have a set of module that each of us can use, a working recipe.

How would that be best done?

• A showcase site - this could be a vanilla site or one with content
• Documentation
• Install profile