Plan for Sharing Video Between Stations

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kreynen's picture

The current plan to share files between locations and provide an off site backup of the broadcast quality MPEG2 is to move the files to Archive.org using the advanced interface to their Contribution Engine. Due to the size of these files, users will be able to configure when these transfers happen (ie. from 1AM-4AM) or tigger an immediate upload.

Because Archive.org only stores a subset of metadata required by the Open Media modules, the entire metadata record would also be transferred to a centralized database as well. The location of the broadcast quality MPEG2 would be stored in this central database as well. In theory this approach would support multiple offsite storage/sharing options like Amazon S3, Internet2 SAN, a commercial solution offered by one of the playback server vendors, or even a more P2P based approach (if stations opened up ftp/http access to a mirror of their RAID or some other configuration like that).

The central database will give stations (and potentially the public) the option to search the entire library of shared content. By tracking the correctly registered Creative Commons licenses, stations will be able to confidently rebroadcast (or even remix if the license allows that!) the content that has been shared.

Any feedback on this strategy would be greatly appreciated!

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Comments

nice to see the archive playing a role

jdcreativity's picture

Great to see the Internet Archive in the scheme of things. I only wish mpeg2's were directly editable in my NLE. As long as I can search the centralized database in an intuitive way (not like how I get around the Internet Archive) I am right there with you (and, well the transcoding needed for editing will be part of the workflow for the remixes, anyway!)

It might be nice to provide some kind of block displays for aggregated videos that have been contributed to the network. These could be regional blocks, thematic, user voted, especially curated, etc. Truly, the one thing I lament over the Internet Archive is how hard it is to find the good stuff. Rarely does the relevant cream rise to the top of my searches. But I suppose the IA is just the back end, not the front end, right (not that Drupal.org is easy to navigate around either)?

archive.org as archive or primary source

ericG's picture

I've done a number of projects over the years that use archive.org for data storage and archiving.

I love the Internet Archive and respect what they've created, but it tends to be a very frustrating system to interact with, both via the web interface and via their api. bandwidth and transfer rates also will be an issue for the sort of data needed for broadcast quality video.

westis's picture

This indeed sounds like an interesting solution! A question, has there been any thoughts on how to handle content that is for sharing between public access stations, but for some reason is not open to the general public? I suppose those files will have to be stored on private servers somehow, rather than archive.org.

That could be because of music permissions, where the artist only allowed it to be used in the context of public access, or movies in movie festivals where the producer has agreed to let it be shown on public access channels, but doesn't necessarily want it shared on a public site. Although these could be protected with different licenses there still may be reasons why someone might not want anyone to be able to download a file, however much we encourage Creative Commons.

I also agree with jdaniels that block displays for aggregated videos would make things a lot easier. Not the least if this same network would be used internationally. There could even be groups, so one for example easily could find the latest programs from Sweden, without necessarily having to browse through lists of programs in English.

And lastly, how and when will the central metadata database be built? That might be something we can help out with from Sweden.

/Daniel, Open Channel Vaxjo, Sweden

I'm loving how this is

bonobo's picture

I'm loving how this is developing --

Like Daniel, above, I have a question on the metadata required for each video --

Is the info on the metadata structure available (and if you have already posted it in the group, and I have missed that, apologies in advance).

Thanks,

Bill


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kreynen's picture

I am working on another Gliffy that shows the current DOM and MNN/Openflows schemas and what the new Drupal 6 Open Media schemas will looks like. Both DOM and MNN rely heavily on CCK, so the first step was to determine if those tables needed to be rolled into modules or could stay in CCK. After some testing, we determined that in Drupal 6 we could safely create the content types in CCK programmatically from sub-modules and protect those using CCK Schema Protector (http://drupal.org/project/cck_schema_protector <= I have a working alpha I need to commit). This approach will allow us to reuse more of the existing code and continue leverage power already in CCK as well as the improvements that community continues to make.

Openflows has some really sophisticated reservation and and class scheduling work they've done for MNN. We are hoping work with them to convert the dependencies on CiviCRM and a userpoint budget system in their code into features that can be added/opted into later while these modules are updated from 4.7 to 6.

For video, at a minimum we will have support for pbcore as well as geocoding, creative commons licensing, and OpenID identities. We also plan to generate everything required for the Yahoo Media RSS spec so that stations can easily add a Miro channel for their shows.

Step 1. Get the standardized

kreynen's picture

Step 1. Get the standardized Drupal driven ingest and metadata tagging process deployed at multiple stations
Step 2. Start sharing content
Step 3. $$$

Just kidding about step 3, but we will definitely build interfaces into the Open Media module to search, schedule downloads, subscribe to download episodes of a series, download the most popular videos, etc, but initially we need to keep it simple as far as licensing and sharing... single licensing system (Creative Commons) single (but separate) location for metadata and files.

I will post something more detailed about the conversations Brian and I have had about geocoding soon, but the big benefit of the centralized database is we could add basic geocoding to the station/location end and more sophisticated, true spatial support on the centralize db.

This would allow you to draw a polygon or multi-point line and search for videos with geotags within 10/20/30 miles of the polygon or line. I developed an interface for geosearching for another Drupal project I'd love to integrate into this project.

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