Kicking Video Around
I've had my head rammed neck deep into a big pile of stuff I barely understand for the past couple of days, trying to get my head around the challenges of displaying video on a web site, especially video that can be viewed on the end user's iphone and ipad.
We've been doing a lot of video already -- and we have used a whole constellation of different solutions. We're using embedded video fields in CCK, hand-embedded u-stream live feeds, self-hosted flash files played through an old version of the Video module. And those have been working pretty well for us.
Then I bought my iPad. And Steve Jobs' war on Flash became front page news. And a few other use cases and needs have cropped up in a couple of different projects. So . . . we're doing a lot of experimentation. Right now, in two different areas, I'm playing around with two major paths towards video:
Kaltura - Kaltura is an open source project with a pay service big brother, like the Zimbra mail server solution. We've installed the community version on a server here in the office and we're working using it as a self-hosted video server engine for several of our web sites. We like a lot of what Kaltura lets us do -- we also really like the look of the paid versions, but . . . well, maybe down the line we'll be ready for something like that.
Mediafront/Amazon S3 - We're toying with Mediafront as the front-end player and amazon's game-changing file hosting service (Amazon S3) to deliver low-cost high-function video that uses the new HTML 5 video tags to deliver video (degrading to flash) so we can deliver video to no-flash environments like the iphone and ipad.
Neither solution is quite ready for prime time yet, but we're working on them. You can check out a proof of concept for the mediafront/s3 build here at Drupaleveryting.
More on these efforts soon . . . what video solutions are YOU playing with?
