By metapunk on

I'm currently working on a few projects that involve Drupal and Multi-Media.
In this post I want to review the various ways I see of doing this within Drupal and I want to get some advice/opinions from others.

Basically a Podcast is just an RSS feed and in theory any drupal module with an uploaded attachment should operate as an podcastable RSS feed, right ?

So the first option would be to simply create either fleixnodes or story modules and have uploaded attachments and then categorize them based upon their content type. And to utilize upload to attach the files to each node.

This option has its potential simplicity as a benefit but it would lack some of the features of the audio module and video module. The other main drawback is that it would require users to painstakingly upload their content via an http interface which is a recipe for timeout and wasted effort. If anyone knows a way to link remote files currently in drupal that would be nice. Also a customization/opening of the code from ourmedia.org so that other drupal sites could upload their content to archive.org would be helpful.

The next option is to utilize the audio module. This is pretty much the same as the previous in terms of it currently lacks support for remotely linking files. It adds the features of a flash mp3 player and getid3 support to read tracks.

Ber Kessels had proposed a new way to deal with files that seemed very interesting but is currently waiting development that would allow linking of files to nodes and also allow files to be remote/local.

So I'm dealing with radio shows that are about 55 megs in size and I want to podcast them.
There is a station module which drewish coded but I think it would need some customization and/or tweaking to work and it seemed more orientated towards ripping streams automatically than allowing content to be uploaded after the fact.

There is also a podcast module. I'm not sure if it is has been updated for 4.7 but it added some functionalities, such as the creation of different podcasts for different shows and creating better RSS feeds that are more compatiable with the Itunes store. As far as I know this module is only available as a link from Drupalart.org rather than even having its own CVS.

The next question is the different between 4.6 audio and 4.7 audio. I think in order to use the audio module with 4.7 you need to download the audio module from drewish's sandbox and utilize filemanager.

None of this is particularly easy to set-up and I've been kind of scratching my head waiting for a good opportunity to dig my teeth in and just letting content float away without getting it online properly. So anyone who has done with and would like to share their configuration it would be much appreciated.

I know I can figure this out but it would be nice if we could come up with some best practices as a community and really start cranking out the Drupal as multimedia platform for communitys.

Tis all

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

Ektoras’s picture

Ektoras commented

Hello. I saw your thread out of the corner of my eye and thought I'd lob this post into the mix for consideration. One other potential avenue of investigation is to completely delegate podcast management to a standalone podcast management application such as Loudblog and use the Loudbot plugin as the bridge between it and Drupal to embed the podcast entries directly into Drupal content. Loudblog itself supports a decent set of features such as remote hosting, iTunes feeds, listener stats, ID3 tag editing and flash player, so might raise an eyebrow of interest if it was known that it is possible to leverage these in collaboration with Drupal.

I'm certainly not suggesting that this is the best way to handle podcasts in Drupal - the Drupal-Loudbot-Loudblog sandwich should, after all, be viewed as an interim solution - and maybe this approach won't turn out to be appropriate for what you have in mind but, then again, I thought it was worth mentioning.