Video content in Drupal today

Hello,

Just to start with something I want to share my own experience with video in Drupal. Here is what I've found and studied after a couple of months fighting with tasks related to video content.

The first module was, of course, video.module. It is a big and powerful module. I loved it a lot for its features but, nevertheless, I was slightly disappointed because of several reasons (to be short):
1. Video node can't be flexibly extended unless you patch the module (at least when I was trying it).
2. Video module is too big and I've got a feeling that its functionality had to be splitted into more smaller and more abstract and universal modules. For instance, it should not implement Custom Fields (this is a task of another module).

The main and greatest advantage of this module is a set of video specific features and a bundle of perfect ideas proposed by Fabio. My proposition for now is to think together how we can split it into separate modules each of which can be improved independently. May be all of them together can be joint into a video package then.

That was clear that such modules as CCK, Views, etc. are the future of Drupal. That is why I decided to create a videofield.module which is a plugin for CCK just like an imagefield.module. The main aim of this field is to read, analyze and store video specific information right in a node_[content name] table for flexible search, indexing, retriving, etc.
The main disadvantage of my videofield.module is that it has nothing to play video. We have neither flash nor JS player, so we just output video information and you can download video file or stream it using default browser abilities.

Again, I have a feeling that streaming video data must be a separate module which has to:

1. stream any kind of video just by its URL.
2. give ability to use any 3-d party player (theme functions probably).
3. be a separate solution and doesn't depend on either CCK or videofield.

Looks like video.module can do this (didn't try it). Also, I heard about coolfilter.module from one of Drupal guys. I didn't play with it much but it looks like a solution I described.

Another interesting thing is an imagecache.module by Darrel O'Pry which is a global solution for transforming images which can be used by any other image module including imagefield itself. A little bit later I found that Darrel started to create a transformer.module which is assumed to be a file transformer API module which can be extended (you can create various transform plugins). It looks like imagecahe will use transformer in the future.

In the end, here is one more task for us - create something like a videocache.module just like imagecache and use it to transform video (it may be at least conversion to different formats).

Thanks for your time.
Thanks Fabio for inviting me into this group.