[IMC-Video] flash player recipe

[mtoups at indymedia.org]

So I think flash is the worst way to play videos, but since most people 
use windows and windows seems totally broken with regard to video, I 
guess it is necessary to use flash for people who can't install something 
like VLC.  It does work pretty much anywhere.

Anyway, I recently did a conversion to flash video for the Pittsburgh IMC 
TV program which is online here: http://video.indypgh.org

It uses a creative commons licensed player from here: 
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player

and here are some ffmpegX docs on converting the video itself:
http://ffmpegx.com/flv.html

ffmpeg on linux can do this as well, and could be called server-side by a 
CMS. (the php code below includes some ffmpeg command line syntax)  if we 
do have the CPU time to convert videos, there are plenty of other 
derivitives we could generate -- archive.org has a similar system 
for making derivitive video conversions which is worth checking out.

as for the other youtube features: I am personally kind of tired of 
hearing about youtube all the time -- I think it is just another internet 
social networking fad, like friendster, orkut, myspace, etc.  stuff like 
rss we already use, and i think tagging can be useful too.  but let's 
evaluate features in terms of how they apply to an indymedia site, 
instead of trying to copy the latest internet fad.

-matt

On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, lotu5 wrote:

> yeah, fuck amazon and their software patents, i was just talking about
> the flash player stuff...
>
> On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 02:49 -0700, mark burdett wrote:
>> and, boot up an amazon ec2 to handle the video conversion... ;)
>>
>> flash is apparently user-friendly for a lot of folks, i'd be happy as
>> long as there was a "download the original" link.
>>
>> i wouldn't put indymedia stuff online @ s3, given the potential for
>> copyright/other legal issues.  maybe it could work with a local backup.
>>
>> --mark
>>
>> On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:59:25 -0700, lotu5 at resist.ca wrote:
>>> We reall, really need to do something like this for video.indymedia.org
>>> using nimiq or whatever its next incarnation is:
>>>
>>> http://www.tunaspecial.com/?p=162
>>>
>>> also, some other great featuers of youtube that make people use it a lot are:
>>>
>>> - user accounts
>>> - rss feeds and subscriptions
>>> - comments
>>> - messaging
>>> - tags, allowing "related videos"
>>>
>>> here's the full posting from arthur's blog post, found on
>>> indyblogs.protest.net:
>>>
>>>  A Drupal youtube Site Recipe
>>>
>>> Overview
>>> This describes a Drupal project to create a youtube style video sharing
>>> site. There are two major pieces that this project dealt with that stretch
>>> the project:
>>> # converting users? uploaded files into a multi-platform format (flv flash
>>> videos)
>>> # hosting the uploaded content with amazon?s s3 services
>>>
>>> The project ended up breaking the upload process apart from the conversion
>>> and media hosting processes. Since Drupal already does a good job of
>>> getting media on to a machine, what seemed an appropriate way to conserve
>>> hardware cycles was to break the conversion process out in a separate
>>> script. This script uses the Drupal database to find out what files it
>>> needs to process, processes them, then moves them, pushes them over to the
>>> s3 servers, and then updates the Drupal database with urls to the media.
>>>
>>> Why not the Drupal video module?
>>> Given that there is a preexisting Drupal video module which does a nice
>>> job of embedding media in the page, why go the route of writing custom
>>> script?
>>>
>>> Well there are several reasons for this, one of the primary reasons is
>>> that the Drupal file system management isn?t yet up to the task of
>>> integrating to an off site server easily.
>>>
>>> Secondly, I wanted to break the processing side out from the uploading, so
>>> that in the event of large numbers of simultaneous uploads, the strain on
>>> the server could be moderated. While ffmpeg doesn?t hit the server that
>>> hard, it?s isn?t hard to imagine that a few uploads and a few conversions
>>> happening concurrently could really load up a machine.
>>>
>>> Why use CCK?
>>> Part of the thinking behind this project is an attempt to stay as ?in the
>>> box? as possible- instead of writing large numbers of custom modules to
>>> handle the specifics of things, I figured we could use CCK, use a few
>>> tricks (like the form_alter and nodeapi hooks) to make the upload process
>>> function more elegantly.
>>>
>>> Secondly, CCK offers greater flexibility for integration with views,
>>> increasing the amount of data collected in the future, and so on.
>>>
>>> Let?s get started
>>> Let?s assume you?ve got Drupal all setup and a CCK content type created
>>> for your videos. There are two things you?re going to need to add to that
>>> content type:
>>> # a amazon url
>>> # a thumbnail path
>>>
>>> I created a custom module which uses the form alter hook to hide these
>>> when the user creates their video, but you don?t need to do this.
>>>
>>> So now we?ve got some information about how to start finding out files we
>>> need to process- because no newly uploaded file will have an amazon url,
>>> we know that we can use this as a point of reference for what needs to get
>>> processed. Obviously, this is an assumption that holds true in my system-
>>> you need to make sure that when you?re getting your list of files that you
>>> choose an appropriate way to select them.
>>>
>>> $query = "SELECT files.filepath, files.nid FROM files " .
>>> "LEFT JOIN ". $drupal_cck_content_table . " ON files.nid = ".
>>> $drupal_cck_content_table . ".nid " .
>>> "LEFT JOIN node ON node.vid = ". $drupal_cck_content_table . ".vid " .
>>> "WHERE ". $drupal_cck_content_table . "." . $drupal_cck_amazon_url_field
>>> ." = ''";
>>>
>>>> From here, I?ve got files and nids that I can use to my heart?s content.
>>> My next step is to process these files. We can do this fairly simply:
>>>
>>> $command = "$path_to_ffmpeg -i $file_path -acodec mp3 -ar 22050 -ab 32
>>> -vcodec flv -s " . $output_width . "X" . $output_height ." $flv_output";
>>> exec($command, $data );
>>>
>>> Note that you should have the ?enable-mp3lame and ?enable-faad support
>>> compiled into ffmpeg to be able to convert avi and mov files into flash.
>>>
>>> We should also create a thumbnail for this video:
>>> $command = "$path_to_ffmpeg -y -i $file_path -vframes 1 -ss $thumb_time
>>> -an -vcodec mjpeg -f rawvideo -s " . $thumb_width . "X" . $thumb_height ."
>>> $thumb_path";
>>> exec($command, $data);
>>>
>>> You may want to move the file to a different location at this point- I
>>> move my source files to an archive so that if media needs to be
>>> reconverted, that can happen.
>>>
>>> Now we need to move the flv file to amazon?s s3. I used the storage3
>>> library which made this straight forward:
>>>
>>> $s3=new storage3($myAccessKeyId, $mySecretAccessKey, $url);
>>> // put file on amazon
>>> $s3->putFile($file_path, $bucket, $file_name);
>>> // set the ACL
>>> $s3->setACL($bucket, $file_name);
>>> return "http://s3.amazonaws.com/" . $bucket . "/" . $file_name;
>>>
>>> At this point, we need to update Drupal?s database so that it knows about
>>> all these good things that we?ve done. I?ve stored output from the various
>>> functions so far in $files.
>>>
>>> // update files directory with the new path
>>> $query = "UPDATE files SET filepath = '". $file['archived_file'] . "'
>>> WHERE nid = '". $file['nid'] . "'";
>>> query_db($query);
>>> $query = "UPDATE $drupal_cck_content_table SET
>>> $drupal_cck_amazon_url_field = '" . $file['amazon_url'] . " WHERE nid =
>>> '". $file['nid'] . "'";
>>> query_db($query);
>>> $query = "UPDATE $drupal_cck_content_table SET
>>> $drupal_cck_thumbnailpath_field = '". $file['thumb']."' WHERE nid = '".
>>> $file['nid'] . "'";
>>> query_db($query);
>>> $query = "UPDATE node SET status = 1 WHERE nid='". $file['nid'] . "'";
>>> query_db($query);
>>> $query = "TRUNCATE cache";
>>> query_db($query);
>>>
>>> Note that here I publish the node (by default, the node does not publish
>>> when the user uploads), and I truncate the cache table. It?s unfortunate
>>> to do this, however, I was running into problems with cached node data,
>>> and the brute force approach seemed to do the job.
>>>
>>> I have this script running off cron, so it will batch process if
>>> necessary. Obviously there is much missing here- I will publish my script
>>> once I have it cleaned up and presentable. I just wanted to share one
>>> approach to doing this.
>>>
>>> Finally, we?ve got to theme the video node. I made a specific template for
>>> my node and used the following:
>>>
>>> $the_path_to_player = base_path() . path_to_theme() .
>>> "/flash_flv_player/flvplayer.swf";
>>> $the_movie = "$the_path_to_player?file=".
>>> $node->field_amazon_flv_file_url[0][value] . "&autostart=trueℑ=" .
>>> base_path() . file_directory_path() . "/" .
>>> $node->field_thumbnail_path[0][value];
>>>
>>> $params = array(
>>> "allowScriptAccess" => "sameDomain",
>>> "quality" => "high",
>>> "height" => "240",
>>> "width" => "320",
>>> "movie" => "$the_movie" ,
>>> );
>>>
>>> drupal_add_js(drupal_get_path('module','swfobject') . "/swfobject.js");
>>> print swfobject_create($the_movie, $params);
>>>
>>> Once you stitch all this together, you get a pretty nice system.
>>>
>>> Drupal modules
>>> # CCK
>>> # Views
>>> # Voting API
>>> # UserReview
>>> # swfObject
>>> # upload
>>> # a custom module that modifies the cck fields for uploading
>>>
>>> References
>>> # ffmpeg : http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
>>> # php s3 library : http://blog.apokalyptik.com/Storage3/
>>> # flash flv player : http://tunaspecial.com/?feed=rss2
>>> # Video Blogging using Django and Flash(tm) Video (FLV) :
>>> http://blog.go4teams.com/?p=56
>>>