Solution for media upload and distribution

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
You are viewing a wiki page. You are welcome to join the group and then edit it. Be bold!

Objective

Looking to identify the best web based solution (Drupal or third party) that would allow a content creator to upload and distribute media (video, audio, photos, ...for starters) to external sites and services.

Features

These would vary depending on the specific needs. Could be a combo of Drupal modules, third-party solutions or both.

Upload/ingestion

  • Web based service that can embed on any web page
  • Allow user to choose between uploading media from their computer, recording from a webcam, or importing from external sources such as Archive, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Ccmixter, etc.
  • Multiple file upload/import – users can select to add one file or multiple files per session.
  • Publishers can bulk-upload multiple files via FTP
  • File conversion and transcoding
  • Control the level and workflow of encoding, including HD support

Distribution

Provide a way to 'push' media out to other video, audio, and photo sharing sites.

  • Video to YouTube, blip.tv, MySpaceTV, Revver, Internet Archive, and others
  • Photos to Flickr, Photobucket, Internet Archive, and others
  • Audio to Last.fm, Pandora, Live365, SoundCloud, Internet Archive and others

Asset management

  • Select/change licensing, tags, and other metadata.
  • Control over who can view, stream, or download media.
  • Easy organize media into playlists, sets, albums, or shows.
  • Built in editing capabilities

Drupal

Current Drupal based solutions, development and discussions.

Third party solutions

The following services provide good examples of this type of functionality. Some might be good candidates for Drupal integration.

  • SpinXpress - http://www.spinxpress.com/
    • free peer-to-peer software application that lets people share videos, photos, audio and other files of any size on a secure private network. The latest version of SpinXpress lets people not only share media files with friends and co-workers but also lets users publish works to Ourmedia or Blip.tv.
  • Topspin Manager - http://topspinmedia.com/

    • a turnkey suite of technologies and services that provides all the content management and customer relationship tools artists need to distribute and market music directly to fans.
      • A content management system that hosts and organizes artists' music, photos, videos and other media, along with a rights management interface that lets them determine how their content is made available. That includes a commerce engine that facilitates all sales and fulfills all orders, as well as the ability to set prices and usage rules. (E.g., some songs might be given away, streamed indefinitely, expire after a set period of time or be made available only to fan club members.)
      • A product creation tool that lets artists develop special offers from their content, such as premium membership subscriptions, bundled ticket/track products or special e-mail offers—basically any way artists want to offer their catalog to their fans.
      • A fan management system that collects and organizes information like e-mail, location, age, birth date and sales history, as well as data on how many times a fan streams music from Topspin-enabled Web sites, shares music with other friends and what other artists they listen to.
      • A reporting feature that tracks all of the aforementioned tools in granular detail, such as site visits, song streams and downloads with the associated user detail behind each and all of it available in customized charts.
  • iLike artist services - http://www.ilike.com/forartists

    • universal dashboard lets you manage your Page on Facebook, iLike, iTunes*, Ticketmaster, and more... reaching 27 million music fans and 500,000 more every week. Major artists from all genres of music are using iLike’s Universal Artist Dashboard™ and multimedia blogging tools to syndicate their music and content across the Web.
    • what
      • music (albums/songs), bulletin, blog, video, photos, events
    • where
      • Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Ticketmaster
  • ArtistData - https://www.artistdata.com/
    allows you to enter information once, and have it distributed across many different sites.

    • what
      • only syndicate shows/events, but will be adding blogs, news, and more in the upcoming months.
    • where?
      • MySpace, PureVolume, Last.fm, Buzznet, Virb, Famecast, Amie Street, Beta Records, Hoooka, Indie911, Eventful, Pollstar, Mojam, Jambase, ShowClix, Sonicbids
  • ReverbNation - for an overview of features see http://www.reverbnation.com/main/features_tabs

Third party services w/ APIs

Audio Sharing

Video Sharing

Photo Sharing

Resources

Comments

Current Drupal efforts and implementations?

gusaus's picture

Upon looking through the following threads, there seems to lot of momentum building towards some sort of common solution.

How do these tie together? Is there a concerted effort taking place? Any proposals in the works? What would be required (time, funds, skills) to facilitate any sort of collaborative effort?

I think we can leverage the Drupal Dojo as a platform for collaborative workshops/virtual sprints and any needed funds could most likely be raised from donations and sponsors. For now, I'm just trying to get a feel for what's currently happening.

Would be great to get some input from some of the leaders in this space.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Semi Unified Rich Media Solution

arthurf's picture

There is currently a discussion going on that came off this thread (http://groups.drupal.org/node/13898) which is looking to do a higher level integration work between many different Drupal rich media modules. I'm hoping to clean up the proposal a bit more this week and have a more public discussion and some code snippets out this coming week. There will likely be a sprint to develop this code in early January, so keep your eyes peeled.

a.


http://24b6.net

Drupal dojo for discussion and virtual spints?

gusaus's picture

Looks like there's great momentum building for a very much needed solution. This functionality would be ideal for the new sites in development Drupal Dojo and Ourmedia. I'd love to help round up some of the other key players in this space and utilize the Dojo for collaborative sessions and virtual sprints. We also might have a great new system for collective funding - http://www.fossfactory.org/.

Ready when the time is right.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

nonprofit, FOSS solutions

schock's picture

It would be great to see any work in this area make it simple for Drupalistas to integrate nonprofit / noncommercial / FOSS 3rd party media hosts, rather than just the commercial players.

For example, ourmedia.org already has integration with archive.org, and they've been promising to release that code for a while. Is it out yet? If not, let's make sure it gets integrated to any shared solution.

Archive can host video & audio.

Also, what's going on w/wikimedia foundation media solution? We should integrate with them..

The CDN

arthurf's picture

Unless your host has really solid bandwidth, I think it's hard for small organizations to be able to deliver their own high bandwidth content (eg: video). That being said, there are a number of options that can work without it to handle video and audio. For a bang for buck to get an unbranded player, I think S3 is the way to go. There are a number of Drupal solutions for this, media mover among them.

I'd like to do an integration between media mover and archive.org. If anybody can help sponsor or tandem code it with me, I'd be glad to help.

a.


http://24b6.net

archive integration

schock's picture

I believe the integration w/archive is already done, by ourmedia.org folks. They say they are ready to release that code... eh, apperceive?

apperceive: basically the ia.module does: cron fetch of new items, ftp
upload to archive, report of user's media, main work is parser for
archive medata files and node creation routine. new upgrade uses cck
for that

peace
schock

Sounds easy enough

arthurf's picture

If the code is modular, we should be able to integrate it with media mover easily.


http://24b6.net

Exactly!

apperceptions's picture

Yes. This is the direction we wanted to explore next. I see MM is now available as alpha for D6. We would love to reduce our dependencies on custom modules and so MM would be preferred approach.

--

Markus Sandy
http://apperceive.com
http://ourmedia.org

Code for achive?

arthurf's picture

Is there anywhere that I can look to see the code for the integration work for archive.org ?


http://24b6.net

Would love to help make this happen.

gusaus's picture

Ourmedia is looking to implement a solution into their shiny new 6.x site (this is their current 4.6. site - http://www.ourmedia.org/). Would be awesome if Media Mover would fit their needs. Arthur, is there anything we can do to make this happen?

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

In terms of MM

arthurf's picture

In terms of Media Mover, I think the main thing right now is to do some integration with the modules that people are currently using- emfield, image, audio, flashvideo- to help get people using the same tools. I'd like to see XSPF Playlist support these as well so that people can get a nice XML playlist for any of Drupal's media content.

Media Mover D6 is coming along- alpha 2 is not far off and has lots of improvements under the hood. Once I get things a bit more stable, I'd love help testing and improving interface stuff. And if people have ideas for additional integration work, I'm all ears


http://24b6.net

Embed Field

-enzo-'s picture

Hello People

I recommend to use Embedded Field project: http://drupal.org/project/emfield

This module is available for Drupal 5 and 6, with this module we could use third party providers and embed in our nodes.

Currently this module use a field for video, other for audio and other for video, but I'm working in a enhancement for Drupal 6 to use only on field to embed content. ASAP I've the approval from my sponsor; I'll publish a comment here.

Best regards

enzo - Eduardo Garcia

enzo - Eduardo Garcia

Exciting!

arthurf's picture

It looks like there is some good progress on emfield- I'd love to see if we could join forces on handing files as well- seems like it could make a really good platform with something like Asset as the front end


http://24b6.net

Emfield is great for embedding content

gusaus's picture

We're looking for upload and distribution solutions here. This will be a great feature btw.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

NowPublic provides a great example for Drupal

gusaus's picture

NowPublic provides a great example in terms of a Drupal based platform to upload media. Curious to know what they're using underneath the hood.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Filefield + jQuery Media modules

seaneffel's picture

You can look at Filefield and jQuery Media. I noticed that its not on the list above, but its very elegant and highly compatible across platforms, and plays back in the flash media player of your choice. Can also handle MP3 with the same configs. I've got a little screencast on it:

http://www.drupaltherapy.com/node/50

Sean

Filefield and jQuery Media are great options for playback

gusaus's picture

Thanks Sean - I've heard that's a great option and it would cool to create some Dojo sessions around the various ways to play back media. The goal here is to identify various options on the distribution side of things. Sort of an all in one uploader and distributor for content producers. Here are a few more examples of at least elements of this type of functionality...

...a universal Drupal based solution would be pretty slick. If Media Mover might be a key, possibly we can create a project here to help fund development - http://www.fossfactory.org/

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Elephants versus ants

seaneffel's picture

I would make a case that an all-in-one solution is not such a great idea. FWIW, I think big projects are sluggish to maintain and difficult to adapt and to some degree slow down evolution of a concept. Just look at the state of the Video module.

I take a personal philosophy that smaller, multipurpose stepping stones are better. I would like to see an system for uploading files plus another system for file transformation and yet another for presentation, and each of these components could can tapped for all sorts of unintended purposes by other modules down the road. This would leave open the option of changing out one component for another without tackling an entire rebuild of the entire chain. Just my two cents.

Agreed

arthurf's picture

While it makes it more challenging for new users to have multiple modules to configure, good documentation and recipies can go much further in making it possible to have small, compartmentalized modules which play well well together. I feel really strongly that this is a more sustainable way to go.


http://24b6.net

As long as it works for the user(s)

gusaus's picture

Definitely a lot of ways to get from upload to distribution which could range from a mix of Drupal modules to third party services. As original intent of this was to identify solutions, site recipes, and see if we could collaborate and collectively fund new solutions.

For this specific case (err.. I should probably write some use cases in the wiki), I'm looking at this from the end users perspective who needs something drop dead simple. Take someone like an indie musician whose ONLY website is MySpace. They'd be much better off if there was an easy way to upload, distribute, manage and monetize their music. There are services that do this in varying degrees http://www.snocap.com/, http://8tracks.com/, http://www.last.fm/uploadmusic, http://soundcloud.com/, but you still need to get your music in their system (if you know they exist). Kaltura would almost have it, if there was a way to select multiple destinations for your upload - http://corp.kaltura.com/technology/content_ingestion. If there's a way to do this with a home grown Drupal module, that would be pretty valuable to both producers and developers.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

IMCE

KingMoore's picture

Hi,

Sounds like this project is going in a good direction. Some functionality I would like to see (or it might be there already?) is the ability to create a pool of media so it can be reused. I currently do this with images using IMCE and IMCE Field. It allows me to upload images to a pool and select images from the pool to use with a CCK field type.

Media pooling

PixelClever's picture

Yeah, I agree, the file management systems need to be aware of each other so we don't end up wasting disc space with duplicated uploads. I don't know what the status is right now, but the last time I looked at imce's code it looked to me as if it didn't really get its information from the files table at all, but rather read the file directory's contents directly. I think this is one obstacle to unification since we really need the data stored and shared in the database in a standardized way. (On the other hand it is sort of a feature since it allows you to upload bulk files with ftp.)

It seems to me that file field might be the gateway to approach this with since filefield can be used with more than just images and aleady keeps track of mime type and handles transliteration and numerous other issues. Maybe a filefield / imcefield integration is in order. I haven't had time to look under the hood, but I imagine there might be a way to open up the code to other modules in an api (if it isn't already the case). Now imagine if the imce popup made direct use of filefield and file field was given the flexibility of choosing the upload destination if the user had "choose upload directory" permissions. Then you could hook into image cache for resizing and all the file information would be stored in the same way.

Anyway, you never know how it will all work out till you start laying down code, but it's something I've definitely been thinking about. Sometimes I think it would be best to just sit down, take all the lessons learned and write an entirely new file browser for drupal. But would be quite a bit of work considering all the wysywig integration you would have to take care of.

Drupal theming, Module development and logo design:
http://www.PixelClever.com

Drupal theming, Module development and logo design:
http://www.PixelClever.com

Sprinting right now

gusaus's picture

Some of these issues are being tackled during the code sprint happening right now - http://groups.drupal.org/node/18063. There's also a discussion channel open in #drupal-dev. As there's enough material to turn the sprint into a marathon, we're going to start having a regular Drupal Dojo session in which we can have lessons, demos, and collaborate. Will post about that shortly...

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Media sprint recap and next steps

gusaus's picture

Aaron and Arthur have been kind enough to do a Dojo session in which they'll recap the kickoff of the 2009 Media Code Sprint - http://groups.drupal.org/node/18159

This will be the first of many Dojo lessons, sessions, and sprints on Drupal Multimedia. Please tune in and get involved!

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Great Zirafa!...

dahacouk's picture

From: http://groups.drupal.org/node/26305

I must admit, though I've seen this in Gus's list and pretty sure I scanned the website, it took your post to show me what a vindication of the business model (for Kendra Hub and MD4D) this is. I love that ArtistData are trail blazing the business model.

And I hope that the music industry will be cautious and bear in mind that, like Facebook, when ArtistData goes so does the service. And "goes" could mean anything from running out of cash to being bought by Apple/Microsoft to having a few days of server outage - it all happens. Also, what are the costs going to be when ArtistData comes out of beta?

So, I hope the music industry will see sense in backing a free, host anywhere, open source solution.

Note that ArtistData is only concerned with the music industry and only with events, tours and news - so far. Whereas, Kendra Hub will be dealing with media/publishing industry (video, images and ebooks too) and also with syndicating the content social networks and retailers.

ArtistData will be a great resource for us to learn from. I hope they carry on the good work!... ;-)

Cheers Daniel

Music

Group organizers

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: