Spam: The other white meat

With folks using Media Mover to transcode larger and larger video files, cron time outs have become somewhat of a problem as Drupal waits for FFmpeg to complete its processing. With Media Mover one, configurations are run from cron by default (not required, but out of the box) which means that cron runs as long as the Media Mover configuration takes. While it is possible to limit cron runs, the reality of transcoding a gigabyte file is that it takes time regardless of how much horsepower you can throw at it. Media Mover one was setup to be friendly to multi-machine systems, but the system left some things to be desired.

The S3 module for Media Mover just got updated to make the CDN integration easier. As files come through the system, files which already reside on S3 will have $file->s3_uri set which allows theming functions to display the local URI if it is present or the S3 URI if the file is already on S3.

Make that $file->s3_data which is a serialized array of data from the S3 file. This allows for the generation of private urls.

Alexandru Badiu just emailed me to let me know that he has released a new YouTube module that allows files to be stored to YouTube from a standard Media Mover configuration. Awesome!

In an attempt to improve the workflow of Media Mover, I'm going through the process of refining the main API aspect. The main reason for this is to move away from the 4 step model (harvest, process, store and complete) to a chainable set of definable actions.

These are some notes to self as I'm going through the process, but feedback is of course appreciated

function hook_media_mover() {
  return array(
    '#name' => t('My Media Mover module description'),
    '#actions' => array(
      array(
        // give each action in your module a unique id 
        '#action' => 'operation_1',
        // give your action a description
        '#description' => t('Do something with a file!'),
        // harvesting files is a special case. You only need

Here's a quick report back on work that got accomplished today. Lots of code, coffee, and keyboards.

Here's the report back from the beginning of the third day of the media sprint here in NYC. You can see some improvements to the GUI. Today we're going to be working on several pieces- admin, formaters and stream wrappers.

This is a quick demo of the functionality that we've been developing here at the media sprint. This is obviously not polished, but it does show some of the pieces of functionality that we want to finish- functionality that we outlined earlier today on the uploader proposal on the interface group.

Since my last screencast looking at the functionality of FFmpeg Wrapper, I've done quite a bit to improve the interface for transcoding. I've added an AHAH layer for file information which I think is really helpful for inspecting files. If you want a fast introduction to how to transcode files in Drupal, give it a peek.

The 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights has brought to the fore the work of many organizations who are utilizing the web (and Drupal) to fight for human rights across the word.

Witness has been featured several times in the last few days on BoingBoing highlighting content Witness has helped produce and is kept on The Hub. Witness' hub is a unique form of advocacy- part organizing tool, part citizen journalism- The Hub provides a large collection of human rights video which is not subject to the whims of corporations making it quite unique in the commercial world of web media.

While the work that organizations like Witness are doing is vastly more important than the software that they use, it is worth noting that Amnesty International, Witness and Human Rights Watch are all using Drupal in their work. I'd like to think that part of this is because of the commitments of users, developers, and Drupal shops is not just to better software, but to a better world- but it would not be the first time I was accused of being an idealist.

The Hub on Boing Boing:

• [BBtv WORLD + WITNESS.org: 60 Years of Declaration of Human Rights, and Rights of The Mentally Disabled
• Xeni interviews WITNESS.org digital archivist Grace Lile on video and human rights
• BBtv + Witness A Massacre Remembered in Guatemala

Anantagati just announced the new Custom Command module for Media Mover. Essentially it provides a mechanism to run command line utilities to do file processing inside a Media Mover process.

By integrating Token module with the Custom Command module a powerful tool for setting up batch processing with whatever command line tools you need- whether a custom script, application, or firing up a server cloud to process thousands of video files- you've got easy integration right from Drupal.

This is perhaps what is most exciting for me about Media Mover- as it matures, it provides the opportunity for people to easily write powerful modules without having to rebuild the wheel every time- the more stable media mover gets, the easier it will be. The Drupal 5 version already has a RC1 candidate in CVS and the Drupal 6 version will hit Alpha2 shortly.