Best Solution for Outsourcing Video Hosting

Posted by drupalsteve on May 12, 2010 at 12:52am

After spending a day researching and struggling with this topic, I wanted to share my thoughts and spark a discussion.

I needed to host videos of various lengths on a website. Embedded media field seemed to suit my needs perfectly and was a breeze to set up.
I discovered that Youtube only allows videos up to 10 minutes in length. Crisis!
I found the video and flowplayer modules, and set those up. All was right in the world again.
I realized that the maximum upload size of my shared hosting is 7MB. I had numerous files over 100MB in size. Crisis!
Because I was hesitant to fiddle with my shared hosting's PHP settings, I searched for another solution. I found two excellent ones:

Videos hosted on www.archive.org, embedded using the embedded media module. I noticed this was used on the 2010 Drupalcon website, which I take as high praise for the approach.
Kaltura module, which provides 10GB of free video hosting.

My questions now are:

Are there other excellent video hosting solutions that I am overlooking? What makes them better?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of using Kaltura or archive.org to host lengthy videos?

Comments

Video outsourcing

Posted by tlipfert on May 12, 2010 at 2:16am

Have a look at Vimeo.com . I teach at a film school and we have students posting videos and linking all the time. Great quality. Another option is Blip.TV

Good luck.

Theo

Vimeo notes, Businesses may

Posted by drupalsteve on May 12, 2010 at 5:03am

Vimeo notes, Businesses may not use Vimeo to externalize their hosting costs. Vimeo (including Vimeo Plus) is not a business service."

Module which support S3 or

Posted by hypertext200 on May 12, 2010 at 2:39am

Module which support S3 or CDN support will help you, Video Module (http://drupal.org/project/video) also working on that task. You can use FTP videos in video 4.x-dev if you still wants to use your local file system,

Senior Drupal Developer at DrupalConnect

We use S3 with the media

Posted by highermath on May 12, 2010 at 4:15am

We use S3 with the media mover module (http://drupal.org/project/media_mover). This module is very flexible and mature, but requires some involved setup. For Drupal 7, it will be supplanted by the media module (http://drupal.org/project/media), which takes advantage of PHP stream wrappers.

Still need a backend

Posted by arthurf on May 12, 2010 at 2:57pm

You'll still need a backend for the media module to do file transformations. I'm hoping to get media mover ready for this.

http://24b6.net

What we are using

Posted by rcwhiting on May 12, 2010 at 3:41pm

We run a video intensive site with lots of video on Drupal. Both free and monetized. We use simplecdn for our free video content and Amazon S3 for our monetized (and secure) content. We use the Wowza server and the flowplayer exclusively with great success (don't believe the blogs that say it doesn't work - we actually read the documentation :-).

We're getting ready to launch our new monetized service - Buy|Store|Stream where people buy the videos from us, we store them on S3 and give them access to their videos anytime, anywhere. Great solution for selling content but not having to download with DRM (tried that and just didn't work well - too many support issues). We have implemented 3 levels of security in our site - authenticated player, authenticated site and encrypted stream. We've also implemented YouTube embedding in our channels and playlists.

We are on our way to be the largest digital source for music instruction, documentary and concert videos in the world with Drupal, Wowza, Flowplayer and Amazon S3!!!

Check us out at www.musicenthusiast.tv

Randy W.
randy@musicenthusiast.tv

Cloudfront | S3 | MediaFront | Flashvideo

Posted by Dokuro on May 13, 2010 at 6:05am

Hi,

We use Flashvideo with cloudfront-s3 and mediafront to make a lot of good magic happen. We wrote the flashvideo and mediafront, so they are our first picks. You can use other modules such as media mover to do what flashvideo does, but I am not sure if it works with cloudfront? Cloudfront is really nice for the obvious reasons that it downloads from the nearest location to the end user. They have also started RTMP, which we are going to get working with flashvideo and mediafront soon!

Cool thing about mediafront is if you use things like Vimeo or Youtube, you can play it through the OSM Player that is packaged with it.

Anyways, good stuff going on here and many solutions!

-Shaun

Go mediafront!

Posted by arthurf on May 13, 2010 at 11:53am

I'm really excited to see mediafront providing a gpl'd solution for drupal- this is something so critical! FYI, thanks to msonnabaum, media mover does support cloudfront, but as others have noted, it's not the simplest out of the box setup.

http://24b6.net