I am using 4.6.3 and understand that there is momentum in developing an encompassing tool to upload media files using the uploader and generate nodes for them, etc possibly in 4.7. My question is this: Does anyone know of a module or module cocktail to allow users to go to their own blog and post either pictures, audio, or video in their own blog without having to use a "video blog" a podcast blog and a text/photo blog? Can the blog node point to all these other nodes somehow? Can a person upload their video or audio file while posting the post? I tried using the backported video.module and it seems a little user unfriendly. THe user needs to enter pixel dimensions, file size, etc. but most importantly, the file website file location needs to be entered before posting, requiring the user to know something about the file structure of the site to say "http://www.tabletpcpeople.org/files/movies/OnAPlane.wmv" or even "files/movies/OnAPlane.wmv" for example.
The idea is to allow people to post whatever they would like for any given day in their blog using their media of choice at that time, putting a simple clean enclosure in their post in a user friendly manner.
Thanks for your time - I am definitely a noob - "tabletpcpeople.org" is what I am trying to put together.
Comments
I have added this to the feature requests
for a new polymedia module I am working on.
Two approaches
Today, you can just use the upload module to attach any of these filetypes, but of course, this doesn't do anything to either embed or display media as anything other than a link. It does, however, put this into the enclosure tag for RSS feeds, making a podcast/videocast automatically. This works today.
You could include some code in your theme to automatically insert/display any included filetypes, but this would be some advanced theming.
There was some talk about changing blog module to be more of a container -- where, people could create arbitrary node types and just add them to "their blog" -- which wouuld be a view of nodes they decided to add there.
Adrian, your concept of "polymedia" is still not clear to me. If the image, video, and audio modules are all fully developed, what is the role of a polymedia module? I know that acidfree was designed to be a gallery that supported many types out of the box, but from a pure metadata, workflow, and functionality perspective, all of these different media types have their own needs with little overlap.
Interested in knowing more...
Points of disagreement
"all of these different media types have their own needs with little overlap."
We can't know this until we try to build an integrated approach.
"If the image, video, and audio modules are all fully developed"
when will that be?
Next week I will create a thread to discuss these issues and explain the polymedia effort.
File feature requests, then work on them
When more people work on them, rather than starting new projects :P
Actually, I think that image and audio are fairly complete as "core" functions -- image could do with an alternate gallery implementation (which is easy to do, no one has stepped up to do it), and audio has some good playlist and podcast stuff either completed or in development.
Video could probably use the most work, but of course, it's also the trickiest to do.
As I said, interested to hear more.
Temporary solution?
Thank you for your help. At least RSS feeds will have proper enclosures. I heard some people at mambo talking about using Loudblog as a temporary solution to upload and play media files. The new loudbot is said to be compatible with Drupal. Has anybody tried it? If so, is there any benefit to running loudblog and loudbot parallel to drupal?
Otherwise, it seems that using a container would serve well especially if the upload tool could be used from within the blog to select which node to post to depending on uploaded media content or perhaps even by cliking a radio button or something, that way, the user would post into the "video" node as well as in the blog but with one blog interface so they don't necessarily have to know about the other nodes.
It would be great to use the benefits of "most often played video" and possibly best rated video tools along with the simple viewing of the enclosure in one or more person's blogs. Thus it seems that theming could only go so far. However, do you know of anyone that has generated said theme? Thanks again.