Open Media Project

This group is where users and developers of the Knight sponsored Open Media Project share information, discussions, and documentation. The Open Media Project is both a suite of modules based on the system developed by Denver Open Media and the group of 7 development partners who are contributing development, testing, documentation, training or other resources to make the Open Media modules more usable for both the PEG and Drupal communities.

The primary goal of the Open Media Project is to leverage Drupal to give local communities more control over their public access channel. The system will build on several existing modules and maintain the suite of new modules through Drupal's CVS. This is a different approach than most of the previous investments the PEG community has made in Drupal. We are also committed to developing modules that are flexible enough for a variety of uses beyond public access channels.

Current Custom Modules: Open Media Project, Open Media Show, Open Media Airing, Open Media Playback Servers, Open Media Timeslot Scheduler, Open Media Support, Internet Archive and MERCI.

Using CiviEvent for Events (Classes) for more than one day

Posted by stefanwray on May 20, 2009 at 10:14pm

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... taming the beast

Posted by kreynen on May 20, 2009 at 7:36pm

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.

Need Help Setting Up Mail on Ubuntu Server

Posted by stefanwray on May 20, 2009 at 2:57pm

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.

Brief History of the OMP: Year 1

Posted by deproduction on May 15, 2009 at 6:05pm

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/

Drupal Meetup at ACM Northeast Conference

Posted by emilyf on May 14, 2009 at 7:07pm

Start:

2009-05-21 17:30 - 19:00 America/New_York

Organizers:

joegml

emilyf

Event type:

User group meeting

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

Issues with channelAustin Staff OM Project Demo

Posted by stefanwray on May 11, 2009 at 7:06pm

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.

AT&T PEG Encoder Technical Specifications

Posted by stefanwray on May 7, 2009 at 11:26pm

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

OpenID and Open Media

Posted by PetePO on May 7, 2009 at 8:46pm

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.

Data In / Data Out - Part 2

Posted by kreynen on May 7, 2009 at 6:42pm

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.

Data In / Data Out - Part 1

Posted by kreynen on May 6, 2009 at 7:06pm

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.

Spotify opens up to developers

Posted by Dublin Drupaller on May 5, 2009 at 6:22pm

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:

Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal

Posted by stefanwray on May 1, 2009 at 9:18pm

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.

Does Televue (Princeton) Play Nice?

Posted by joegml on April 27, 2009 at 9:18pm

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.

Live Streaming Vendor

Posted by coderdan on April 24, 2009 at 5:53pm

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?

Open Media Coming to Sacramento

Posted by kreynen on April 21, 2009 at 7:28pm

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.

Links from Metadata Session at Open Media Camp

Posted by kreynen on April 18, 2009 at 5:29pm

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/

Experience with Granicus?

Posted by joegml on April 14, 2009 at 9:07pm

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.

Resolved WYSIWYG Problem

Posted by stefanwray on April 13, 2009 at 10:03pm

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.

Getting Involved During the "Napkin Phase"

Posted by kreynen on April 7, 2009 at 4:05pm

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.

Media Sprint at Open Media Camp in Denver!

Posted by aaron on March 30, 2009 at 1:51am

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.

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