Spam: The other white meat

With Media Mover 2 having significantly changed its architecture, the possibility to import and export data has gotten much more interesting. Because Media Mover's configurations now are mostly containers for steps which define the actual things that happen to files, it is possible to export and import both full configurations and individual steps. This is helpful for example if you are tweaking your video conversion process on your development server and then you can export the tweaked settings to your production environment. Mark Sonnabaum has been leading the way getting the integration with CTools done so that there is a familiar interface for getting data in and out.

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!

For folks who need imagecache conversions to be automated, the dev version of Media Mover 6 has a new module which will create all of the imagecache presets that are select for Media Mover files. This makes it easy to to push the derivatives to a CDN service without relying on users to hit the URL for the imagecache file. Hooray!

Ok, it was seriously behind schedule, but views integration for XSPF playlists is finally in a development phase. This lets you output xspf formated data from a view- it will take the label you assign to a field and use that as the tag. Remember- development version.

Discussion is here

Asset is the obvious choice if you need your users to be able to easily upload content and place it within WYWISYG editor. Media Mover is probably on the other side of the spectrum- tones of options, lots of arcane settings that will not make sense if you are not familiar with the ins and outs of rich media- further if you just want to get your transcoded media on the page.

The problem is that Media Mover is more of an API than it is an interface. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to really call it an interface if you’re an end user. A while back, I released the Auto Run module for Media Mover which runs Media Mover configurations when a node is created or updated. This really set the groundwork for starting to move toward running Media Mover configurations on specific user interactions- the ones that I think a majority of people are looking for. This approach- the transcode on create/update content- while workable, still does not give the end user control of how page layout works. For some, this is a fine middle ground approach, for others, unworkable. From my perspective, Asset provides a solid way for users to add content to their nodes. Of course WYSISYG editors are problematic, but they are not going anywhere, and hopefully, their HTML will just get better. Asset goes along way toward improving the integration between WYSIWYG editors and Drupal. Media Mover can remain a work horse for rich media, but it can also play nice when it comes to offering up its services.

In the ever expanding word of Media Mover modules, I finally put together a quick module that handles some of the basic configuration of the JW Flash player. Largely, this helps reduce installation time as no custom theming is required to get the flash player on the page if you're using XSPF Playlist for your content delivery.