By javanaut on

Over the past year, I have seen many conversations about the best way to handle multimedia content on a Drupal site. Curiosity has the best of me now, and I want to survey Drupal users to see how you handle multimedia content on your site.

By handle, I mean anything having to do with the process: input, conversion, storage, permissions, display, moderation, filtering of inappropriate content, site defaults (size, autoplay, etc), or anything else you want to add.

I know at this point, people are using image module (and it's helper modules), filestore/filestore2, attached_file, flexinode as well as the underlying modules such as fscache. A year ago, it was primarily up to the theme developer to do much of the rendering of multimedia, but lately, that seems to be moving more into the realm of module developers (as more multimedia specific modules are created).

Is anyone hosting inline audio or video on their site? How are you doing it?

Comments

robertDouglass’s picture

robertDouglass commented

at http://www.kerryturner.com/node/301 I'm using the flexinode field_mp3 type to list lots of mp3 samples for a CD catalog. Since the attached_node module is installed one could use its syntax to inline the mp3s in any filtered HTML node. Kerry Turner is already doing this to inline images in his blogs and pages. I haven't told him he could do this with the mp3s as well - maybe I should!

- Robert Douglass

-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net

javanaut’s picture

javanaut commented

That's a very well laid out site. I'm curious, I haven't used the field_mp3 flexinode type, but does it format all of the mp3 samples that are listed on this page, or was this manually formatted? Do you manage any arbitrarily sized (perhaps with paged result sets) mp3 lists on the site? I'm curious to see how people deal with searching/sorting and formatting such content. Also, do you have bandwidth constraints in place, such as throttling?

I didn't realize that others were already using the attached_node module. I guess I should make a proper project of it so bugs/issues can be tracked. Cool.

Btw, that's a very nice version of Little Fugue in G minor.

robertDouglass’s picture

robertDouglass commented

The CD flexinodes each have 20 mp3 fields. I also overrode the theme() of the flexinode field to display only the info I wanted to have and to make a table row. The tables aren't sorted. These are the limitations of using the flexinode approach. The advantage is that I spend 3 minutes defining the CD flexinode, 5 minutes overriding the theme and was in principle finished. Of course I first had to learn how to theme flexinodes...

- Robert Douglass

-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

That is is really well done.
Congrates...

Can anyone tell me more about this field_mp3 how to enable it ?

Marcel
http://scriptdiary.com

robertDouglass’s picture

robertDouglass commented

You'll need to get it from the CVS repository. It is in contributions/modules/flexinode/contrib. You need to grab a Sourceforge project to get the ID3 tag information. Instructions are also in the CVS repository. Let me know if you run into problems setting it up.

Eventually I will write an MP3 module which will be much better. I still have to work through a couple more important projects first, though.

- Robert Douglass

-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net

meloman’s picture

meloman commented

I have the same problem. I want to make a lot of files available to download (mp3, pdf, jpg...) but I want them organized in categories. It need to be easy to maintain, like being able to upload a whole directory of files in one step and then enter a description for each file, instead of uploading them one by one by http... is it possible to do? For the moment I use the modules filestore2 but it's not doing what I need. Any suggestion?

javanaut’s picture

javanaut commented

One module that may help you in the future is the mime_registry module. Using it, you can, given a file with proper extension and/or content-type, programatically create nodes from file and file info. mime_registry should be ready for public consumption on Drupal 4.5 in a few weeks. It currently supports creating image, filestore2, blog and story modules. It wouldn't be too difficult to add support for the mp3 flexinode type.

I've thought about either a WebDAV module or DirWatcher for bulk uploads. The simpler one would definitely be the DirWatcher. It would merely look at the contents of a directory on the server, and periodically check for newly created/modified files. Any new content found would result in new nodes being created via mime_registry with the subdirectory acting optionally as a taxonomy term. Once mime_registry is more stable, I'll definitely put this on my todo list.