This may be a simple answer, but it's something I ran into a year or two ago and didn't find a solution. Now I am revisiting the same item, hoping to find a good method. And I'm more hopeful after seeing some of the progress of late in many modules.
I'm wanting to use SWF Tools for using the audio/video players there (well, possibly only the audio players), and what I'm wanting to do is enter a location on the server for the file, rather than uploading the file. That way, I can rely totally on FTP for putting up the files, and then use the node just to use the file. Well, it'd be good to take the Audio module's "import" functionality and tie that in with SWF tools... I suppose that's what I'm looking for... with the Audio module - Imports, all you do is upload via FTP, and then use the Audio Module's import tool to import the audio... it then grabs the MP3 data from the files, and allows you to set additional information.
I'm wanting to try to use SWF tools for more control over the audio players, mainly, and to also create more custom fields in just a custom content type, so I have more control there as well - for views and such.
Any ideas anyone can throw my way, I'd be greatly appreciative. I actually created a new "test site" for testing on, so I can try anything at this point.
If I had more time to tinker, I'd already have this sorted out, or at least I think I would.... maybe... :0)
Comments
Filefield Sources
You might get a more informed response than mine if you posted this in the SWFTools issue queue as a support request. That said, I wonder if you can leverage CCK's filefield, which says it's SWFTools compatible, alongside Filefield Sources: http://drupal.org/project/filefield_sources, which lets you reuse files.
I just looked into this kind
I just looked into this kind of thing recently. The problem with FTPing files is they don't appear in Drupal's files table so Drupal has no idea they exist. That means they can't be used in private filesystems and things like that.
You can still use an FTP'd file with SWFTools and other flash players. All the flash players generally need are a URL to the video/audio file to play. You can get that for any file in the files directory using file_create_url()
I thought the point of using
I thought the point of using the filefield_sources module was that by identifying the file via filefield, it became a part of the database. Is that not the case?
See this
See this thread:
http://drupal.org/node/438940
Not sure if a final workaround has been found but in the current versions of the module at least you can only select files that are already in the database when selecting a file from the file system.
Yeah, looks like still does not work correctly...
It doesn't appear to handle files already on the server correctly. It looks like with filefieldsource, that the FUNCTION is there, but you can't access it via any current built-in gui interface.... IF I could figure out how to use without a GUI, I'd do that, at least for those already on the server, and just use the other options for those not already on the server.
Thank you. Looking into
Thank you. Looking into filefield_sources for this purpose was on my to-do list next week, and this will save me plenty of time. I usually don't suggest things I haven't tested, but I'm glad I did in this case. Sorry if I led anyone astray.
Looks like it could work - from the description
This one definitely looks like it would handle what I want to do, from the description. I'll have to download it, and give it a try this weekend, when I'll hopefully have a few minutes again. :0)
Funny thing - weekends... I end up saying, "I may can get to it this weekend" about oh too many things!
Thanks, eliza411, for this suggestion. I'll definitely take a look.
Oh, and by the way, I posted this to the general form, hoping for a more well-rounded response in a way. If I post to an issue queue for a particular module, then the answers would supposedly be limited to that module... or at least then I'm assuming the problem is only with that module, when in fact, there could be a totally different alternative solution to the issue... and in this case, the Filefield sources may be such a solution. ;0)
Thanks!
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions so far. Thus I'm back at square one - where I was last time. Which is why I've stuck with the Audio module for so long. The Audio module is a VERY good module, but I was hoping to try SWF Tools.
The reason I have a more difficult time than someone uploading say short songs at about 3 minutes is that the audio files I am uploading average around an hour... maybe 45 to 55 minutes real average if I calculated it all. So, in a decent format, mono, the file sizes (smallest ever was 10 or 12MB) are usually between 20 and 25 MB.
Well, I'll see if further tinkering will get it good enough using the upload directly within a node... But for those files already on the server - that's where I mainly was thinking about this. Since the files are already there, I'd be using bandwidth for no reason, and wasting time, basically..... hmm....
The Audio module "imports" the files from the web server itself. You FTP the files to a folder outside of Drupal, and then the Audio Imports module "imports" those files into the selected /sites/default/files/audio folder. So the only things it really does is move the files, and enters their data into the Drupal database file system.
If I could find a way to use the 2 together, then that'd be just hunky dory. I suppose I could come up with a SQL query to run in the background, which would basically copy the Audio Import data over to whatever table stores the SWF Tools data, and go off of that..... maybe, I dunno. That's just a wild guess.
Well, I'm open to any other suggestions for now. I did see one Geeks and God podcast that mentioned something about changing the template.php or some other file, causing the SWF to basically wrap around local server files or something like that... maybe I just need to go back and look that up - again.