Media Mover

arthurf - January 2, 2007 - 21:28

Media Mover is a set of modules which allows website administrators to easily create complex file conversion processes. The core of Media Mover is the media_mover_api module which creates a set of rules allowing multiple modules to interact with a file. Media Mover can take a file emailed to an email account, turn a file attachment into an FLV file, create a new node with the file data, and then save the file on an external file storage system like Amazon's S3 all at once. And that's just the start.

Update: : If you're looking for examples and demonstrations of the Media Mover, check out the news and demonstrations site.

What it does
The media_mover_api module is the handler for Media Mover configurations. It defines four types of behaviors for how modules interact with a file: harvest, process, storage, and complete. A configuration can be made up of multiple modules which define different kinds of harvest, process, storage, and complete behaviors. For example, you can have two different processes that creates high and low bandwidth versions of a video file. Inside of Media Mover, each configuration is distinct, so you can set up as many different kinds of configurations as you like. Media Mover API also offers the opportunity for modules outside of Media Mover to access its functionality.

What you can do
The core set of Media Mover modules offers lots of options for someone manipulating rich media.

Harvest: get attachments from an email account
Harvest: get attached files from nodes of X type
Harvest: get previously harvested files
Harvest: get a file path from a CCK field
Harvest: get files from a FTP server
Process: create a thumbnail of a video file with ffmpeg
Process: transcode video files into web friendly (and other) formats
Process: strip EXIF data from images (MM EXIF)
Process: add meta data to a FLV file (MM FLVTool2)
Storage: move a file to Amazon's S3 service (this also operates as a completion function)
Storage: attach file back to node
Storage: save file and related data as a node
Storage: add a file path to a CCK field
Storage: save file as an Asset

Media Mover allows administrators to setup multiple configurations that are responsible for different kinds of media handling. Using included modules such as Auto Run and MM Asset, administrators can configure transcoding to happen as part of the upload process. Media Mover also runs on Cron, allowing for batch conversion and retrieval from remote sources (email, FTP, etc).

Contributors, developers and suggestions welcome! I'm very interested in attracting other people to build modules for it, get help with the core API, and start deploying it.

Recomended Modules

Drupal Six support is forthcoming- there is a release here which is to be considered development code only. I'm releasing it in the hopes that it will attract support from people and get some patches and other code back into the module.

Media Mover is supported by
arthurf, robeano, JacobSing, bdragon, wmostrey, and CivicActions.