DrupalCon has just started and this has already been a very productive trip. When we first arrived in Europe, I met with Oliver Gibson from the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation. GMCVO is funding some MERCI development that will improve the integration with MERCI make it much easier to use MERCI as a staff driven solution. After a few days of sight seeing in London, we were off to Vaxjo, Sweden to work with Daniel Westergren on adapting the Open Media modules for his hosted environment. To do, we needed 2 things. First, Telvue updated the Open Channel's Princeton to the 3.7.1 release. There were some issues with updating because of Sweden uses PAL vs NTSC, but the Telvue team was able to upgrade the web app portion of the Princeton without breaking the PAL fixes. The other thing we needed was to finish a module I started for BAVC called om_timeslot_remote. Like ffmpeg_wrapper_remote, that module simply intercepts instructions that om_timeslot_scheulder would normally execute locally and instead passes those to a proxy or middle man server that has access to the Princeton's VOL1 Samba mount. There are 3 scripts running on the middle man server.
- listener.php - watches the Princeton's missing files report and transfers the files the Princeton has scheduled that are still in a TBD state.
- om_timeslot_scheduler_remote.php - This script writes the scheduling csv to the VOL1 import directory. While the asset inserts are made directly using SOAP, the scheduling information must still be imported by writing a csv file to native import dir. Because Drupal is hosted on share host on a different network than the Princeton, Drupal can't write that file. Instead it passes the scheduling information to the middle man server that does has the VOL1 share mounted.
- s3_transfer.php - This script moves the VOD files from the local archive on a prosumer NAS to Amazon S3 when they are created. Currently the creation of the VOD is a manual process, but we plan to automate that once some additional hardware is available.
In OKV's case, the middle man server is an older W2K box running XAMPP that has 2 NetGear NASes mounted as well as the Princeton. The box isn't as old as the one pictured, but it is a fraction of the size (and cost) of the servers used by most stations. While all of the code in this workflow needs more work, this is big step towards lowering the server requirements a level most stations can afford and maintain. I commit the code as soon as I add some additional security checks so only the Drupal site can can these scripts.
Comments
Excellent, I've just about
Excellent, I've just about finished the dev release of the internet archive module which would work quite well with this remote workflow. I'm going to post it on Friday after I finish a few more tests with the archive.org team.
Open Media Foundation
Files to make this work
missing_files_listener.php
om_timeslot_scheduler_remote.php
Please keep in mind that these files are likely changing as the solution evolves. To stay up-to-date monitor this group or look in on #drupal-openmedia