[IMC-Video] indytube available on codecoop

Sat Dec 9 11:10:55 PST 2006

Hi, would it be possible for indytube to support widescreen video?
it seems like the mencoder command doesn't (although I didn't yet 
play it in flash, just opened it in VLC, and haven't installed 
flvtool2 yet).

our video thumbnailer handles widescreen:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/11/30/18334168.php#18334169
we just use totem-video-thumbnailer with various gstreamer plugins 
installed.

also, is there any hope for amd64 servers to decode proprietary formats?
it seems the win32 codecs which mplayer relies on won't work.

--mark B.

On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 10:20:36 -0700, john duda wrote:
> if you're looking for an easy way to graft in browser video onto an
> existing indy-cms, check out:
> 
> http://codecoop.org/projects/indytube/
> 
> You can see it in action here:
> http://www.phillyimc.org/en/2006/11/33840.shtml
> 
> Here's the README file(note that the stuff about configuration is out
> of date, there's now a nice config file):
> 
> What is IndyTube?
> -----------------
> 
> This is a very basic script for reencoding arbitrary video files to
> flash video (flv), and then including this video in the browser with a
> flash video player.  The exact same approach can be used to embed a
> cortado java player that can play ogg theora files, but the files here
> don't do that yet.  The overriding design goal is to make it
> absolutely trivial for the largest number of users to view video
> content, while still making the original files available for download,
> and not compromising privacy and anonymity of uploaders and viewers by
> relying on a commercial service like YouTube or Google Video.
> 
> Design: Why not build this into the cms?
> --------------------------------
> 
> Video transcoding, even on good hardware, is a time-intensive task.
> So any CMS that wanted to support embedded video would probably need
> to run the encoding job in an asynchronous process anyway.  On systems
> that do support asynchronous production processes, like Mir, you
> probably wouldn't want to put big encoding jobs into the queue anyway,
> because no one wants to wait 20 minutes for a video to finish encoding
> when they need to update the startpage.  Running the video encoding in
> a separate process(the script is designed to be run out of cron) also
> allows the encoding process to get "nice'd" to an appropriate priority
> so it doesn't bring down your server.  It also means that it is very
> easy to graft support for embedded video onto any existing cms that
> stores video in the file system.
> 
> What do I need to run this?
> --------------------------- 
> 
> * Python 2.4 or higher
> 
> * Flowplayer, available from http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net
> 
> 	This provides a nice embedded flash video player, you should
> 	download a copy and put a copy on your web site.
> 
> * Mencoder, the Mplayer video encoder/decoder swiss army knife.  
> 
> 	This is better than ffmpeg because it is designed to handle
> 	any proprietary cruft that your users throw at it.
> 	Get it from www.mplayerhq.hu, or, for debian packages, from
> 	www.debian-multimedia.org
> 
> * FLVTool2, http://inlet-media.de/flvtool2
> 	
> 	You need to be able to write some metadata to the file so
> 	users can seek during playback.  This ruby program does the
> 	trick (make sure you've got ruby installed!)
> 
> * Cheetah template library for Python.
> 	
> 	You can get this from http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/, or just
> 	'apt-get install python-cheetah'
> 
> 
> How do I set it up?
> -------------------
> 
> First, you need to open up indytube.py and change the config variables
> to something sensible(TODO SOON: pull out to command line args).  Here
> you need to set the paths for your orginal and encoded files, plus
> urls for the resources like the flowplayer files and your splash
> screen image(an Indymedia one is included here if you need one).  You
> can also tweak the encoder options(sensible defaults are included for
> small video files and quick encoding with decent quality) and turn off
> encoding altogether.  There's logging settings for debugging, and a
> way to specify the maximum number of encoders you'd like to run in
> parallel, and at what priority.
> 
> You also might want to customize the include.template, which is used
> to generate a fragment to be included in any page with video.  The
> basic idea is that the cms template is tweaked to pull in this
> template, which does nothing if it isn't there, and also to include a
> "waiting for encoder" message, which a bit of javascript in the
> generated include fragment "turns off".
> 
> An example, for mir, might make this more clear.  What you need to do
> is go into the place in the article template where the link to the
> video file attached to an article happens, and add something like:
> 
>   <div id="waiting4encoder${media.id}">
> 	<i>Waiting for encoder...check back in 10 minutes for flash version.</i>
>   </div>
>   <!--#include virtual="/media/${media.creationdate.formatted["yyyy/MM"]}/${media.id}.flv.inc" -->
> 
> Make sure that the "waiting4encoder" div preceds the include file!
> Notice you can also put something like:
> 
> 	<!--#config errmsg=" " -->
> 
> if you want to suppress the [an error occurred while processing this
> directive] stuff that will happen while you're waiting for an encoder.
> 
> Then, just set up indytube.py to run every minute or so out of cron.
> If the maximum numbers of encoders are already running, it just
> stops. Otherwise, it will check for video files in the directory
> you've specified, see if they've already been encoded, or if another
> encoder is already handling them, and if not, generate the flv file
> and the include file.  And then you've got streaming embedded video.
>  
> 
> Still Todo:
> -----------
> 
> * Theora/Cortado support
> * Configuration via command-line options
> * Video thumbnail generation (how do you find a non-blank frame automatically?)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> this is where my public key can be found:
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 03817826
> Key fingerprint = 6C11 8D70 2ADE EFA9 498D  72CB 77EA 391A 0381 7826
> 
> 
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