Open Media Project

One of the challenges in updating Denver Open Media's site was balancing the amount of new, cutting-edge technologies like Flash and JQuery we use with the level of technology DOM's users already have installed or are capable of supporting with older computers. It is difficult to reach out to the next generation of PEG members while still supporting old technologies with the resources we have available.

I feel like I'm posting too often to the group, but there is so much information we are trying to share. Since there is a conversation about FFmpeg on the ACM Announce list and it came up in a call with Austin, I thought I should try to get some of what we've been doing with FFmpeg posted. Most of the discussion on the ACM list has been about applications that wrap FFmpeg up with a graphic interface. That's a great introduction, but to really leverage FFmpeg the PEG community is going to have start developing some collective knowledge about FFmpeg's command line configuration options.

DOM doesn't currently use this, but we'd like to add an X-List export to the Open Media System. I've read Tightrope and Facil can export schedule information in this format.

Googling for TV Guide X-List only returns a few links before assuming I meant X-Files. It looks like TV Guide has taken a page from the ACM in developing secret standards.

Can someone who is using X-List post some details about the XML format how that information is sent to TV Guide?

We're currently on a call with Channel Austin, they mentioned that during their CiviCRM training the question of being able to generate Producer ID cards came up. Back in 2007 Jacob Redding developed the PDF-ID card module to help with exactly this at MNN. Check it out at http://drupal.org/project/PDF-IDcard.

I'm not sure if it supports pulling information from CiviCRM, and it looks like it needs upgraded to D6, but we could probably take care of this in an hour or two. (Or someone else could, even better! =)

Last week, channelAustin participated in Denver Open Media's demo of how they use CiviCRM with the Open Media Project (http://groups.drupal.org/node/18772)

In the past two days, 4 channelAustin staff (Communications Director & Webmaster, IT Director, Training Director, and Equipment staff) worked with David Strauss from Four Kitchens (http://fourkitchens.com/) to set up CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org/), analyze table schemas in our existing Facil database (MS Access 97), determine which Facil tables and fields we want to import into CiviCRM.

Just a quick note that I recorded a screencast this morning on how we're specifically integrating some of our project tools with CiviCRM. CiviCRM is not required for any of the tools, nor are we technically supporting it as part of this project -- but a lot of stations (like us) need the membership and event management tools of a good CRM. It's kind of cut off at the end, as the software I used only allows for 5 minutes -- but not much is lost.

Click here for the Video

Drupal is a powerful tool for building amazingly scalable websites quickly and simply. The use of multimedia in Drupal has posed challenges to many users and developers of all abilities. Drupal Multimedia addresses the main questions regarding how to implement video, image, and audio content in a way that is elegant for the developer, as well as the end user. The language of the book is straight to the point, and provides a framework to practice building an assortment of multimedia sites using a variety of modules in the context of test or example sites.