By seaneffel on

Our non-profit television station is pushing new methods for distributing media across the web. This is an easy task for a big corporation, but a daunting one for our little org. So far we have a video stream and some hosted video files.

I just spotted this new DTV beta where one can submit their own channels that can be picked up by the new player. The question I need answered is how to convert the tags in the RSS feed that Drupal pushes out so that it matches with the specs that the DTV RSS requires?

http://participatoryculture.org/feeds.php

I don't understand the finer points of publishing in XML, so if anyone who has a handle on it could offer me a starting point that would be great.

And beyond, this would be a great module! You can just add any yoursite.org/path/feed to a list that would automatically convert the drupal rss into one which could be picked up by DTV.

http://www.cctvcambridge.org

Comments

drofnar’s picture

drofnar commented

at participatoryculture.org, BTW sean Im not sure if youre aware, but the DTV is for people watching/downloading and theres Broadcast Machine for those publishing. Broadcast Machine is particularly interesting because it uses bittorrent, a p2p file distribution method, drastically reducing bandwidth costs for the "TV" station. Bitttorrent (good p2p content distribution) is actually one of the underlying tech advances that makes such independent web TV seriously possible.

I cant answer your questions fully about the feeds, because im also not that well versed in XML. But what I do notice is that the drupal feeds will need to be RSS 2.0 compliant or use yahoo media extensions or USM. This was from their site:

".... Broadcast Machine makes and DTV prefers RSS feeds (which we call "Channels") of the following type:

* RSS 2.0
* with Yahoo Media extensions
* and USM - Universal Subscription Mechanism

RSS is intentionally loose about the semantics of tags. This is how we do it for DTV:

* Each RSS item corresponds to a single video item.
* Title, description, and all other item elements correspond to the video (not a blog post about the video).
* We use RSS enclosure tags rather than media content tags for backwards compatibility......"

Currently I dont believe Drupals RSS feeds are rss2.0 compliant or use Yahoo Media Extensions or USM. So it may be a problem.

However I dont think that the best way would be for drupal to simply spit out feeds for DTV directly anyway. Becuase just releasing video in that way wont help address the problems of distributing large quantities of media from your TV station. It will become very heavy and very expensive in bandwidth. far better would be to employ a solution that takes advantage of p2p distribution. And the best to date is bittorrent. What Broadcast Machine has done is to make the whole bittorrent experience a lot easier all round.

My recomendation is that you use BraodcastMachine (BM) as the means to serve the content from your tv station, its unbelievably simple to install and setup. (though mine isnt yet working for some reason).

Interms of module development, yes I agree would be excellent for Drupal to offer this capability out of the box. For me that implies a simple module that integrates BM into Drupal. And then upgrading the Drupal RSS feeds capabilities to support Yahoo Media Extensions and RSS2.0. Then we could simply do a media select on RSS feeds for video (or audio) and direct it to the relevant channel in the integrated BM on the drupal website.

For not to much effort, just integrating the great work already done. Drupal can become a proper out of the box community TV station offering.

BTW Sean CCTV is a great site and a great project - Im totaly in with your goals.. Hope it goes well.. Mark

seaneffel’s picture

seaneffel commented

Thanks for the notes, Mark.

Without personally understanding php or module design, how can I push this forward? I don't have much to contribute but I would like to know how to make this project come to life.

And if you haven't already looked, this is the reason we are pushing for internet content delivery:

http://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/129

We have had secure funding for 15 years, and three free cable channels in Cambridge, but this legislation is threatening to take all that away from CCTV and the other 1500 community television stations like us.

drofnar’s picture

drofnar commented

Im keen to see something like this built into Drupal too , I just noticed on one of civicspace forums that they have plans for blogtorrent integration. Blogtorrent is basically the backend of Broadcast Machine, and may be better route because Drupal would be able to provide the front end and the blogtorrent may be much simpler to insert.. I think I'll check out Blogtorrent and will let you know what I find

seaneffel’s picture

seaneffel commented

The author of video.module has something interesting going too. I've opened up this DTV discussion on that thread too.

http://drupal.org/node/25230

fax8’s picture

fax8 commented

I readed more about DTV.
If I'm right DTV works like this:
(Let's image to do all by hands, without using broadcast machine)

a web admin put a video on a web server
to an address (e.g. http://www.host.com/video/myvid.mov)

then a RSS feed for the video have to be created
at the address http://www.host.com/video/feed.xml
maybe something like this:


<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>My Movie Site</title>
<link>http://www.host.com</link>
<description>This is my video site.</description>
....
<item>
<title>MyMovie</title>
<link>http://www.foo.com/item1.htm</link>
....
<media:content url="http://www.host.com/video/myvid.mov" fileSize="12216320" type="video/quicktime" expression="sample"/>
<creativeCommons:license>http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0</creativeCommons:license>
<media:adult>false</media:adult>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Then the admin go to the publishing page and add his channel (http://www.host.com/video/feed.xml) to the list.

So the only thing that video.module doesn't have is the automatic
creation of a xml file wich contains info on video nodes.

But I think that this feature should't be harder to implement.

----
My websites: adrenalinteam.it - windsmpeg.tk

drofnar’s picture

drofnar commented

Without using bittorrent the bandwidth costs could become huge.

Does the video module use bittorrent, or plan to use it or something similar?

fax8’s picture

fax8 commented

This is true. Maybe we could add support for adding a .torrent
file to a video node.
But I think that the simple solution (without torrent)
is a good starting point.

I will implement it next weeks.

----
My websites: adrenalinteam.it - windsmpeg.tk

kerrizor’s picture

kerrizor commented

Im keen to see something like this built into Drupal too

Funny, I just came to that exact conclusion. I'm working on nearly this exact problem on my current project. Other than doing it myself, is there anyone currently working on this problem? I'm new to the drupal community, unsure what the proper "protocol" is on breaking plates :)

ica’s picture

ica commented

I am not sure you have seen this or not
http://drupal.org/node/30399
and this i'have posted 'Stream player radio + podcasting from local or remote server'
http://drupal.org/node/30399#comment-52684

.. just thinking maybe there is a need for a general media module combined
with options /medium to handle

a dream combined Media Module could be combined features and handle methods could be;
.Audio
-Upload
-StreamRadio
-StreamPodcast
-Torrent
-RSS
-'AudioTag'
-- Audio Gallery/Player (QT,Real,WM, Flash plug ins)

.Video
-Upload
-Stream
-Torrent
-RSS
-'VideoTag'
-- Video Gallery/Player (QT,Real,WM, Flash plug ins)

.Image
-Upload
-Torrent
-RSS
-'ImageTag'
--Image Gallery (http://news.yahoo.com/photos/) and the slideshow as a model

ps: Just a speculation of some ideas here without proper documentation ~ sorry :)

Uwe Hermann’s picture

Uwe Hermann commented

I'm in contact with several people who are involved (e.g. the video.module author), and I'm currently working on integrating Drupal and DTV / Broadcast machine. I hope to have patches for video.module, (+ torrent support and other things) ready soon.

Uwe.
--
hermann-uwe.de | crazy-hacks.org | unmaintained-free-software.org

ica’s picture

ica commented

I am please to see possibilities and ideas resonance smultaniously with many others.
exploring benefits, ever expanding possibilities and avenues in open source, and technology of the medium(s) and the people around it ...is great! :)

kerrizor’s picture

kerrizor commented

Awesome! No, more than awesome, that's "awesome to the front register!"

drofnar’s picture

drofnar commented

Yes thats great Uwe, am very keen to see this, will definitely test it out when ready.