Open Media Project

Tightropes allow a more flexible configuration, but setting it up is a little less than intuitive. We spent some time on the phone with Tightrope's tech support while we were in Amherst, so I thought I'd post what we learned here.

In the Main Media > Location Settings > Control Module Sets in under the I/O tab you can add the path to an SMB mount on the webserver... as long as there a user with the same username and password as your Tightrope is running as. This seems less than ideal, but there is no place to store additional authentication credentials.

Here is a document that shows what we believe are the required fields for Synergy Broadcast System. We will need to map metadata created by the OM Project to these fields.

Looking for a drupal guru who are well versed in module development in handling REST, XMLRPC calls to external api's. If you are familiar with facebook api, myspace api, or twitter api, it is a plus.

Work start in early July. Drupal version 6,

I've attached a diagram of channelAustin's Open Media System integration for purposes of sharing how we are integrating Open Media tools with our Synergy Broadcast System. Diagram indicates the three environments - Linux (Ubuntu), Windows, and Mac - and shows the pathways between workstations, encoders, servers, and archive.

The red line indicates a pathway that is incomplete as of this writing.

We've finally settled on a date for a meet-and-greet for anyone who wants to learn more about the Open Media Project or get involved. The Open Media Project partners and raSANTIAGO are hosting the social at 3:30 p.m.

I work for raSANTIAGO, a consultancy in Portland, Oregon; we do a lot of work with CiviCRM. We've been working with the good folks at Portland Community Media to convert their membership data from Facil to CiviCRM.

I've put together an annotated set of MySQL queries that I'm using to import PCM's data; we're also releasing it "into the wild" for anyone to adapt and use for their own similar conversion efforts.

An important part of expanding use and adoption of the Open Media Project tools is getting reliable, useful evaluation of the work. For the past several months, we've been a bit overwhelmed and surprised by the diversity of requests for evaluation and documentation for groups with intentions to use the Open Media Project tools in environments we had not anticipated.

As well as all the goodness of the regular Meetup there will be a special extra serving of Open Media Project joy for everyone lucky enough to be in Amherst this Thursday.

Amherst Community Television is proud to host the June Western Mass Drupal Meetup Thursday June 25th, 6pm, ACTV Studios, with guest attendees from Denver Open Media.

Full info here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/23135

Many thanks to Rick Hood for his ongoing organizing efforts in making this happen.

Tomorrow we will be hosting a two day virtual over-the-shoulder installation and configuration of the OM Show module. This session will be open to all interested parties. From the webinar you will be left with an understanding of software, hardware and technical support needed to install and configure the Open Media Show module.

Contact me for connection information. Please forgive the short notice.

THIS IS A TWO PART WEBINAR

Wednesday, June 10th 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM MST
AND
Thursday, June 11th 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM MST

I am just wondering if there is any module development going on for clickable agendas (also referred to as chapters and cue points) for video out there...I (along with help from others) have working code that allows for chapter-based clicking through javascript in quicktime and flash, and it also works when pulling in a video from youtube. I would like to see this code integrated (as it's in demand by many PEG stations out there), but it's currently quite a mess and needs to be cleaned up into a functional module.

channelAustin is seeking help to properly set up exim4, postfix, or even sendmail on its web server for purposes of having email function properly for its Drupal installation. We have a Sun Server in-house with Ubuntu, Drupal, and CiviCRM. Our ISP is Grande Communications (but that will be changing soon (this week even)). And our mail server is handled pro bono by Primus Networks here in Austin.

Overall the Davis implementation went well and they are on their way to making http://dctv.davismedia.org/ a feature complete install that gives their members more functionality and control.

We've been using the Taxonomy XML to import the hierarchical taxonomy we've been using for genres in Project, Show, and Timeslot Theme. Taxonomy XML now supports taxonomy as a service.

I wanted to reset this discussion on how Public Access and related media initiatives would benefit from collaboration in a wide range of areas from development, documentation, training, funding/fundraising, marketing, promotion, business, hosting, sales, and services.

If you've used CiviCRM, particularly the CiviEvent feature, you'll know that for creating events there is a field for the Start Date and one for the End Date. This is great if your event (or class) is a one-day only event. There doesn't appear to be any provision for the same event taking place for more than 1 day, such as a class that meets from 1:00 to 4:00 PM on a Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. How have any of you who have started to use, or are considering using, CiviCRM for event registration (for classes or other purposes) dealt with this?

Drupal permissions are a sticky wicket. You want to configure your site with just enough roles to make it functional and secure, but not so many roles your can't manage your permissions for Drupal's UI. But when every module, content type, as well as every field (when Content Permissions is enabled) adds an additional checkbox, this can quickly become overwhelming.

I've attached Denver Open Media's full permission configuration. I'm going post more about specific sections of this in comments to this post.

We could use some help to set up mail on our Ubuntu server. It's been recommended that we set up POSIX, although it's not clear that this is absolutely essential. The Ubuntu server has Drupal and CiviCRM. The main purposes for mail right now is for users getting password confirmations, for people to send us mail through the contact form, and eventually for sending users other types of notifications. We have CiviCRM but are using Constant Contact right now. We may switch to using CiviMail. So we may increase the way we use mail on the server in the future.

As we near the completion of year-1 of the Open Media Project, I thought it might be useful to provide a brief history so-far. Part of my agreement in winning the Knight News Challenge grant that made the Open Media Project possible was to post frequent updates to the PBS Idealab Blog. Looking back, those entries provide a good timeline of year-1, and a look forward at year 2.

You can see all 10 entries at http://www.pbs.org/idealab/tony_shawcross_1/

The ACM Northeast conference is happening in Burlington, VT Thursday and Friday May 21st and 22nd. Info on the conference here: http://acm-ne.org/node/60

We are having a Drupal meetup (and dinner and drinks) on Thursday the 21st from 530 - 7PM at Vermont Pub & Brewery sponsored by TelVue corporation. The goal is to network with people in the area and discuss PEG/Drupal projects.

If anyone is planning to attend the conference, please think about coming to this event. The original post about this is at PEGspace group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/22117

I did a OM Project demo this morning (May 11, 2009) for 8 channelAustin staff members. I had a few problems that would be good to resolve for when I have to do another demo, which should be soon. I'm posting them here so that others can see what issues I had and so we all can understand the solution. If you are doing demos while your site is still development, you may run across this.

Here are some of things we ran into.

1) Unblocking members didn't work.

We have hundreds of user accounts on our development site. These were imported from our existing records. And these accounts are all blocked. In order for anyone to participate in the demo, their user accounts need to be unblocked. The choice was to either unblock all accounts, or to search for the specific user names and unblock those. The unblock would have been temporary.

Here below are the current AT&T standards for encoding video for deliver from PEG stations.

Vendors are approaching cities, like Austin, with proprietary systems that will deliver this encoded stream.

I'm wondering about open source solutions for this.

PEG Encoder Technical Specifications

The following minimum requirements and specifications must be configured on the municipality
encoder/streamer in order to comply with AT&T’s IPTV PEG solution.

Video Encoding Standard: Windows Media Video 9/VC-1 Main Profile
Video Streaming Bandwidth: 1.25 Mbps

After doing a bit of research in OpenID (I’m a complete novice other than thinking “oh – that’s cool” one day) I think it would be a great system to keep multiple pcmtv.org domains and development environments running smoothly.

For those of you who are like me and don’t know much about it there’s a great video tutorial of the concept here.

As I was doing some research it seemed to make the most sense to me for PCM to offer to be an Identity Provider and offer people user.pcmtv.org as their ID.

I'm writing this mainly for Rich Vazquez (who's working with channelAustin to add the functionality to Synergy) and Aaron Todd (a developer at Leightronix working to add this functionality to their NEXUS line), but the information should be useful to everyone.

One of the major requirements of the Open Media System was the solutions needed to be playback server agnostic. Before we can start putting data into different playback servers we need to know what's already there, so we started with getting the data out of the different servers. To do this we recreate the existing database of playback events as Airings using the Broadcast Synchronization module. Regardless of what type of playback server or the amount of time you are scheduling through Drupal, the Airings look the same.

hi guys,

This is just a quick "heads up" post. If you're not familiar with spotify, I recommend you try it out, if it's available where you are. It's probably the cleverest and slickest music app I've seen online since liquid audio (which became itunes music store).

Anyway..the heads up is that they've opened up to developers with a libspotify (C API package).

The following is from the spotify site:

The following are ongoing and/or proposed projects pertaining to Drupal media. Many of these have shared needs for features, documentation, and qualified talent to do the much needed work.

Drupal products

Summary

The following is a proposal from Open Media Camp participants for a process to develop video metadata standards, particularly for video genre types. The proposal is to involve the Open Web Foundation to establish such a process.

The Open Media Project

The Open Media Project was initiated by Denver Open Media in 2008, and is now a collaborative effort with Amherst Community Television, Boston Neighborhood Network, channelAustin, Davis Media Access, Portland Community Media, and Urbana Public Television. The project's mission is to develop and distribute an open source tool set that will enable public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations to work together as user-driven, locally-focused, alternative media networks. Based in Drupal, the project is developing a modular, web-based system that makes local user-generated media more accessible locally and nationally through digital distribution. Leveraging thousands of open-source contributors, the tools are relatively easy and affordable to implement.

Open Media Camp

The Open Media Camp held in Denver, Colorado on April 18 and 19, 2009, brought together Drupal media module developers and implementers, including representatives from all but one of the Open Media Project partner sites. The Drupal developers who attended maintain some of the key media modules. The two-day camp at Denver Open Media's facilities was organized in an "unconference" format. There were sessions focused on metadata standards, video modules, CCK and Views modules, and media management, as well as on topics specifically related to the Open Media Project such as theming and MERCI, the reservation module.

Existing Video Metadata Practices

Public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations approach video metadata and media genre type standards in a variety of ways. Some centers operate with no standards at all and allow open or free tagging, where users choose their own tags or key word descriptors for their video programs. PegMedia, a media transfer site for PEG (Public, Education, Government) community television stations, with more than 400 stations and producers, only uses open tagging. They have no standards for genre or subject types. Rather than using a pre-defined taxonomy, this bottom-up method of open tagging generates what some call a folksonomy.

I'm trying to talk to a Princeton B1000 broadcast server with a Linux system. It is acting coyly and doesn't want to play. The B1000 appears to be a locked Linux box.

We are looking to do 24/7 live streaming of one of our cable channels. I'm looking to have the stream hosted by a 3rd party. Anyone have any recommendations for the host?

The team from Civic Pixel / Deproduction / Denver Open Media will be in the Sacramento area the May 25-27th. We're going to be there to implement the Open Media System at Davis Access Media, but we'd love to do a song and dance for the SacDUG'ers while we're there if that's possible. We going to be presenting at the Open Video Conference June 18-19.

These are the links I referenced in the quick overview of metadata use in the Open Media System.

Working Within the Box to Modifying Existing Standards...
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/03/second-implementation-of-the-open-med...
http://pubforge.org/pubblog/2009/03/31/lawrence-lessig-at-sxsw-on-open-m...
http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/subjectAuthorityUsed.html
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_290-hopper.html

Existing Organizations...
http://pbcoreresources.org/
http://www.pegmedia.org/
http://openwebfoundation.org/

Anybody have any experience with Granicus? http://www.granicus.com/Streaming-Media-Government.aspx

Can a Drupal based system compete w/ Granicus' economies of scale? Is a Granicus system a good fit for a Public Access station in a small town of 9000 people? Any real life experience stories welcomed.

Thank you.

I resolved a problem I was having with Wysiwyg API. And in case you run into the issue, here is what happened and what to do about it.

For channelAustin's implementation of the Open Media Project, we are using the Wysiwyg API ( http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg ). This is a step up from what Denver Open Media is using.

When I created content, and tried to edit content, I got a black edit screen when in the Full HTML input mode. I searched all over the Drupal site for an answer, but didn't find one.

I found the answer in the Wysiwyg profile (where you can configure Wysiwyg) and saw that the Editor CSS was set to "Use theme CSS". Evidently, there is a black background in the Zen-based open media theme.

So I switched it to "Editor default CSS" and it all seems to be working fine.

I spent awhile trying to figure this out. The answer was not intuitive - to me at least.

Before we started implementing this project at any location, we asked each location for a network diagram. The partners we are working with in the beta phase provided those in a number of formats and to different degrees of detail. Our goal wasn't to dictate that every network look the same in order to use the Open Media System. These diagrams were just to give us a rough idea of what each location had in place. We wanted to know if the web server could communicate with playback servers and digital archive. What type of connections were in place to move large files form server to server.

Make sure to attend the Media Sprint Update Panel and join the Media Sprint 2009 at Open Media Camp in Denver, on April 18-19!

The presenters of this panel, including Aaron Winborn (aaron), Arthur Foelsche (arthurf), and Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg (Alex UA), will discuss the ongoing efforts of the Media Sprint by the Drupal Media working group to bring to fruition the Media module and related work.

This panel will begin with a demonstration and discussion of the current state of the ongoing development of the Media module, and a thorough examination of the concept for its extensible API. Finally, we'll discuss the near and far-term plans, including the Media Sprint planned for the next day of the Open Media Camp.

Portland Community Media, in partnership with Denver Open Media, has created documents explaining the rules of scheduling Producer> Project> Programs. The document includes rules for series programs, scheduled on a quarterly basis, as well as individual programs that get scheduled on a first come, first served basis.

I have also included rules on how PCM schedules filler programs.

The focus of this discussion is:
- to communicate current scheduling rules and guidelines
- to discuss other methods of annual, quarterly or daily scheduling rules used by other media centers

The following modules integrate third party video with Drupal, such as YouTube or Blip.TV. Modules included may automatically parse URLs and/or embed code to determine the provider to store and display, and may or may not display thumbnails, autoplay, and other features (outlined below). Please help to make this list more accurate!

Documentation Notes

This document's purpose is to outline a structure for documentation about the Open Media System.

This documentation will follow the Drupal Editorial Style Guide

The original contributors to this outline structure are Stefan Wray, Ann Theis, and John Montgomery.

First draft created on March 21, 2009.

Project Documentation

This is general documentation about the Open Media System:

• Mission and Vision
  The Open Media System is the development and distribution of an open-source tool set that will enable local Public Access TV stations and Community Media organizations to collaborate as a user-driven, locally-focused alternative media network targeted at under-served communities.

  Based in Drupal, the project is developing a modular, web-based system that puts the community in the driver's seat and makes the media they produce more accessible locally and nation-wide through digital distribution. Leveraging thousands of open-source contributors, the tools are relatively easy and affordable to implement, transforming any CTC or Access center into a user-driven, Net2.0 portal for their community.

• Background and History (from Knight Grant Language - Need from Tony)
• OM sites - Partners and contributors
  • Denver Open Media
  • channelAustin
  • Urbana Public Television
  • Boston Neighborhood Network
  • Portland Community Television
  • Amherst Community Television
  • Davis Media Access
• Open Media System Architecture (site specific DOM workflow)
• Open Media System Network (connected sites and national architecture)
• System Requirements
  • Technology
  • Human resources
  • Community support
  • Financial

Developer Documentation
This is documentation for Drupal developers:

• OM Specific Drupal Development
  • Open Media Support (module)
  • TVframe (theme)
  • Open Media Broadcast Synchronization (module)
  • OM_Show (Drupal module)
  • OM_Timeslot (Drupal module)
  • Other Drupal modules in development
• Additional Required Drupal Modules
  • Organic Groups
  • MERCI (Manage Equipment Reservations, Checkout and Inventory)

Implementation Documentation

This is documentation for installation and configuration:

• System requirements
• Recommended Drupal modules
• Open Media System Installation and Configuration Guidelines
  • Open Media Support
    • How to install and configure the Open Media Support module
  • TVframe
    • How to install and configure the TVframe theme, including Zen module
    • Details about the Zen module and sub-sub-theme
  • Projects (Organic Groups)
    • How to install and configure Organic Groups
    • How the Open Media System is using Organic groups for Projects
  • MERCI
    • How to install and configure MERCI
    • How to customize MERCI for specific needs
  • Show
    • How to install and configure the Create Show feature
  • Broadcast Sync
    • Background information on different playback servers
      • Telvue's Princeton servers
      • Leightronix's Nexus servers
      • Synergy Broadcast System servers
    • How to establish a standard RSS structure in different playback server environments
    • Details on Airings, Broadcast cast sync, Broadcast server schedule feed
  • Timeslot
    • How to install and configure Timeslot
    • How does Drupal interfaced with playback servers.
  • Events (classes)
    • How to install CiviCRM (link to standard CiviCRM documentation)
    • How to configure CiviCRM's Event feature for class registration
    • How to establish rules for class certifications and prerequisites
    • How to set up PayPal for online transactions

User Documentation

This is documentation for Open Media System users.

• Administrative Users
  • Projects (Organic Groups)
    • How to set up Content types
    • Explanation of Project Wiki, Project Blog, Project Event
  • MERCI
    • How to manage reservations (view, change status, edit, delete)
    • How to set up checkoutable inventory (create content types, create content, create taxonomy)
    • How to set permissions for checkoutable inventory
  • CiviGroup Role Sync
    • Add Roles and Sync privileges with CiviCRM
  • Project
    • How to Merge Duplicate Projects
  • Shows
    • How to change author/project
  • Timeslots/Themes
    • Creating Timeslot Themes
    • Creating Timeslot Events
    • Managing Timeslot Events
  • Classes and Groups (CiviCRM & CiviEvent)
    • How to enter new classes in CiviCRM's Events
    • How to create Groups
    • How to create Smart Groups
    • How to "certify" members using groups

• Member Users
  • Projects (Organic Groups)
    • How to create projects
      • Project Blog
      • Project Wiki
      • Project Event
      • How to add/manage members
      • Project Tools
      • How to merge projects
    • MERCI: Equipment Reservations
      • How to create reservations using MERCI's my reservations
      • How to view/edit/delete reservations
    • Show
      • How to create a show
      • How to manage a show
    • Timeslot
      • How to get a series show
    • Events (classes)
      • How to sign up and register for classes
  • Public Users
    • How to vote and leave comments

Before I forget to post this, these are the instructions I've been following to setup FFmpeg on Ubuntu:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095

These instructions work off the latest SVN copy of ffmpeg, which is a necessity if you want to be able to get any support (first response to any ffmpeg troubleshooting question will be "are you using the latest copy from SVN?")

There are definitely better ways to compile it, but this is a great start -- so anyone with the expertise feel free to suggest improvements.

Original URL: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=1

April User Meetup - San Francisco
April 29 8:30 AM - 12:30 PM
This is a great opportunity to meet other CiviCRM users as well as members of the core team, share best practices, ask your tough questions and help chart the future of the project.
Location: San Francisco, CA
This is a free event.

Original URL: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=2

April Developer Camp - San Francisco
April 29th, 8:30 AM through April 30th, 5:30 PM
This 2-day hands-on session is targeted at integrators and developers who want to learn more about customizing, extending and debugging CiviCRM.
Location: San Francisco, CA
Camp Fee: 2-day Camp $250

http://www.ourchannels.org/?p=234

http://openvideoconference.org/

Conference Highlights

* Brings together stakeholders in the online video space (video makers, coders, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, etc.) for cross-pollination and development of the Open Video movement.
* Raises the public profile of video creators and artists, especially those whose work relies on or contributes to Open Video.
* Raises public interest and awareness around the Principles of an Open Video Ecosystem, a community effort to define best practices in online video.

Conference Details

One of the things we've been looking at out here in Portland is effective crewing management and tracking through the Open Media Project. At PCM we follow a policy of "if you don't use it you loose it" where producers need to keep active (at least once a year) in order to keep their certifications up-to-date. We also follow a policy of needing to work on productions before you can start your own.

On the CiviCRM home page http://www.civicrm.org there are two event listings. I have already registered for the Developer Camp, but the User Meetup sounds good too.

Anyone else planning to go to either of these? They're taking place just after the NTEN conference, which I am not going to, but other people might already be in SF.

-- Lane

April User Meetup (free) - San Francisco http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=1
April Developer Camp ($250) - San Francisco http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=2

This came up during a call with Portland, but I think there are probably other stations that want this feature as well so I'm thinking of adding the fields to the core Project content type.

Denver Open Media will do a presentation on its Open Media Project today, March 14, at 5:30 PM at BarCampAustin at 311 East 5th Street in Austin. DOM staff are in town for SXSW and to do work at channelAustin .

I'm starting a new thread on Creative Commons that picks up on these comments:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68554
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68578
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68596
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68738

There are several factors to consider in transitioning to using Creative Commons licensing:

1) Current actual practice & historical practice
2) Current policies and procedures
3) Current cablecast contract

We are using this discussion to collaborate our issues and questions for the OM toolset implementation at the PCM Development Site.

Issues and Questions to Follow

Contents

• What is the Media module?
• What is a stream?
• What is a wrapper?
• What is a PHP Stream?
• What is the Media project?
• Where can I find the Media project?
• Why do we need the Media project?
• Will the Media module support displaying multimedia files?
• What modules will support Media module?
• Who is working on the Media module?
• When can I use the Media module?
• What can I do to help?
• Is the Media module going to be in core?
• What functionality will the Media module support out of the box?