Really Struggling with Video in CCK/Views - Suggestions?

ryantdecker - May 17, 2009 - 22:02

I'm trying to create a content type for displaying related media of various types. (basically one instance each of a related pdf, mp3, and flv - notes, audio, and video - of the same presentation) Using CCK and FileField allows splendidly for the creation of a node with those files attached along with the dates of the presentation,etc. Views is able to do the rest beautifully with one "small" problem: clicking on a link to the flv of course initiates a download instead of playing the video. unfortunately uploading as an swf isn't an option, so I'm looking for a way to have the link displayed by Views play the file when clicked. I'm not picky about whether it plays in the same page or a seperate page, or even whether the video is visible from the page load, but I don't want it to play unless it's clicked, and I want to be able to do it without manually creating a separate node with the video.

Over the past few days I've installed, read documentation for, searched issues queues, and otherwise played with FlashField, SWFTools, SWFEmbed, FlashVideo, CCK FlashVideo, and maybe a couple of other modules and just have not been able to get a decent result at all. I would prefer to use a Flash cs3 skin that I created and saved on the server as a .swf, rather than using an flv player, but I'm open to any suggestions at this point.

I'm running Drupal 6.11 and PHP 5

Is this possible without extensive custom code? Does anyone have an example of a site that does something similar? Maybe I'm close but need to take the steps in a specific order? Any suggestion is great - I'm over my head and out of ideas.

Thanks!!
Ryan

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field formatter

bohz - May 17, 2009 - 22:40

If I understand correctly, you need a player field formatter to play your flv files.
From my limited experience I can suggest
http://drupal.org/project/jquery_media
http://drupal.org/project/flvmediaplayer
http://drupal.org/project/swftools
but check the other media modules, I'm sure there's much more.
cheers

jquery_media might help

ryantdecker - May 17, 2009 - 23:20

I'll have to look a little closer at it. For whatever reason, possibly the order I configured things (?) the other two I tried and didn't get the results I was hoping for. Still very much looking for suggests at this point, and especially examples if anyone has one!

Thanks!

An example

bohz - May 18, 2009 - 09:30

I have installed swf tools which provides three CCK field formatters: video with download link, video without link and playlist.
I have set flowplayer 3 to be the player of choice for swf tools.
Now if I create a view with row style:fields and filtered for my video content type,
when I add the field content:video (which pulls the flv(s) from my video content type), and choose the swf tools - no download link field formatter, the view will display the flv(s) attached to video nodes within a flowplayer 3 instance.
Just tried this right now.
Hope this helps

Guess I'll give that another go...

ryantdecker - May 20, 2009 - 19:51

Thanks bohz! I don't mind digging in to swftools more, I was just at a point where I wasn't convinced I was even going the right direction anymore. a couple of questions:

Is the 'video' content type simply referring to a cck node type you created or is that dependent on/created by another module?
Also, do you have any fields besides video in that content type?

Thanks for your help - like I said, I'm not looking for a quick fix, but knowing I'm going the right direction makes it easier to keep sinking time into - much appreciated.

Ryan

I agree

bohz - May 20, 2009 - 21:10

It's fairly common for me to feel lost among two or more ways to achieve something with Drupal
The amount of knowledge available is simply overwhelming. at least to me. :)
So I cannot tell for sure if swf tools is the right way to go. Probably it depends on the context.
My solution is to stay informed and documented as much as I can.

Anyway.
Actually I have tried the example above using flv files transcoded from other formats by FFMPEG through the flashvideo module (http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo).
But it is really independent from the source, swftools plays any flv files attached to the node.
It worked also in my previous setup, without flashvideo and using uploaded flvs.

In both cases the video content type was a standard content type with one or more filefield:upload fields and other fields like user reference and standard cck widgets.

My main concern with swftools is that it's not easy to create thumb previews automatically, so I had to create an additional imagefield to upload the thumb separately...

Cheers