Apture vs. CCK EMField?

Haven't tried EMfield, but I just tried Apture earlier today. Apture is very nice, but clearly a commercial offering. If your site gets more than 5M views per month, you have to start paying them, and every one of your links and embeds using their logic displays with a little "byline" advert announcing that you (the web visitor) could have this functionality on their web site.

After using it for a bit, it sorta takes over your drupal pages. You can add content and edit a page, outside the content editor, and when you go back to the editor page the stuff you added outside of the editor is not there. Well, it's sorta there via ids added to the node content, maybe? not really sure. Their system sorta replaces the drupal content editor, it seems. And something about that seems over-stepping, IMHO.

If you're primarily seeking an alternative to the tediousness of adding links and embedding 3rd party content into your pages, it will be less tedious with them, but you're still doing manual insertion of single links and embeds at a time. There's no auto-term locating and link/embed attaching. That would be nice...

It's a judgment call you'd have to make after trying it out. It only took me 5-10 minutes to install and get working, but a bit more before I began to realize how much functionality they were adding, and over-writing / replacing drupal's logic transparently from underneath, if that makes sense...

I have a feeling that they take over too much. It's very nice, that's for sure. But it's not really drupal anymore.

@James Hertsch: Another option is the 'Kaltura' module at http://drupal.org/project/kaltura

Kaltura is similar to Apture. The main difference is that Kaltura Community Edition (CE) is open source like Drupal. So 100% free.

I wrote an article comparing both modules. As well as other modules. http://drupal.org/node/567432