spam: the other white meat

The XSPF Playlist module finally supports Views in a more appropriate way. Previously, you could get it to display a view by passing a view name to the module. This was cumbersome and didn’t handle arguments for views well. Plus somebody would sooner or later figure out how to exploit it as it was giving way to much freedom to what was being passed via URL stream.

So now you can build XSPF Playlists just as you would an RSS feed with Views. This really opens the doors to doing serious channel based content over a wide variety of channels or even defined pushed content.

Check out the latest from the DRUPAL-5 cvs branch.

In the ever expanding word of Media Mover modules, I finally put together a quick module that handles some of the basic configuration of the JW Flash player. Largely, this helps reduce installation time as no custom theming is required to get the flash player on the page if you’re using XSPF Playlist for your content delivery.

I haven’t finished all the specific configuration options that Jeroen supports in version 3.14, but that will be coming along. Additionally, I’ll be working on supporting the “recommended content” XML that is now possible in the XSPF Playlist module. In terms of making the Drupal YouTube competitor, well this will be a major step forward. Anyway, you can check out FLVMediaPlayer and see if it makes getting the flash player going any easier.

As the number of modules that help Media Mover work has expanded, understanding how all the modules work together has gotten much more complicated. I’ve put together this map to the Media Mover universe which should hopefully start explaining how all this stuff works together.

In dealing with FLV files, it’s really nice to have the meta data available for flash players and other uses of the files. Unfortunately, when you convert a file with FFmpeg, it doesn’t add this data in. FLVTool2 is a Ruby tool that does exactly this. Though it requires having a running version of Ruby, it’s straight forward to install.

I took the Media Mover EXIF module that Robin wrote and basically swapped out a few things to replace it the FLVTool2 processing. It’s straight forward and integrates in with the rest of Media Mover quite well.

What needs to be built along side of this is a library which can provide some of the basic functionality of FLVTool- making the file meta data available for other uses seamlessly. It should be fairly straightforward to do this, and likely, another module for other people to utilize. For this first iteration though, it adds the meta data so flash players should correctly report playing time.

UPDATE: You can grab it from the Drupal module page: mm_flvtool2

I ran Doxygen on Media Mover and have put the documentation up for people to use. Largely, it shows how much work there is to do, but at least it’s there at this point. I’ll probably provide a feed for the CVS HEAD, DRUPAL-5, and DRUPAL-6 at some point in the near future. In other Media Mover news, Brandon from ChicagoTech is working on a Drupal 6 port of Media Mover, so that will soon be available!

mediamover.24b6.net | doxygen for media mover