Meetings notes from drupal Media SIG at Drupal meet-up January 5th 3-6PM, San Francisco

The main meeting broke into smaller groups for 45minutes discussion. I moderated a media session.
We started out looking at what Media meant for everyone and how they plan to use drupal for media-related projects. There were users with moderate media needs, intensive 100,000+ node users and a group aggregating media feeds. Interest in all the media types was represented in the group of roughly ten people: flash,video, audio, appcasting, etc).

Most of the meeting focussed on media assets as nodes and metadata but another important issue with media concerns use of Flash, audio and other media elements in the GUI and navigational aspects of drupal sites. People are finding it hard to build flash intensive skins and themes.

We discussed the difficulty with the many conflicting and poorly documented syndication formats for media, e.g. itunes store, Media RSS and the transcoding requirements of the various hosting and distribution partners, e.g., video.google.com vs itunes video store.

I was flattered that many people had read my grumble about the need for coordinated effort on media integration in drupal:
http://drupal.org/node/30399

I announced I am turning these grumbles into action: a module for 4.6 that implements a node for all the media types of interest. I didn't mention the working name for it: polymedia. People expressed interest in seeing the database schema and the list of media types I plan to support.

Lots of people said they had money to invest in media aspects of drupal. I mentioned the difficulty finding good experienced programmers to work on this. Please contact me if you are in this category as we seem to be in a position to make things move quickly now.

I learned a new way this media stuff is hard: there are a lot of business rules and versioning issues associated with the workflow from raw media to published media. Much of this can be seen as implementing the "book" versioning features for media as well as text. The layers of rules for distribution/ formats/metadata/embedded licences etc. may not be easy to map to drupal's role based permission scheme. Hopefully somebody will step forward to address these issues as I would prefer to focus on the media management and player integration issues. I was hoping much of this asset management stuff would be done client-side and we just needed good upload connectivity but people are looking to drupal itself to dp collaborative asset management. A job list module was proposed as part of this.

We discussed media metadata and how web 2.0 (semantics) might be part of the picture.

Hopefully the other participants will correct my lapses of memory and flesh out their issues below: