Streaming video integration

Question

I'm looking for a solution for streaming video in Drupal 6. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have users upload video via a content type, convert and encode it, then have the published version be linked to a streaming server (like DSS). I want to host the streaming server myself and ideally I'd like it to be free.

I've never heard of it, but it seems there is also something called Kaltura that might work.

Anyone have experience in this realm? Know of something simple I could integrate?

The best I option I can see so far seems to be to display the video via jw player and write something custom to upload videos to the streaming server from those that are uploaded via drupal.

Answer 1

I have used Navicast (but not a free) platform to develop a webtv module for Drupal 6. It is based on Output APIs. There are few limitation with the platform APIs that I reported. Navicast Studio a desktop application build around their input APIs used to upload video and adjust video properties. The platform has built in tagging system to categorize videos. Comments on video contents is also managed by the platform.

I used it with Flow Player API module.

I developed Web TV around my own entities.

Answer 2

I did more research on this and I came up with an "easy", Drupal integrated solution. Hopefully this will help inform someone else looking for similar. My approach is as follows:

Convert videos to mp4 (H264) format and upload them natively to Drupal. In my case I plan on using the JW Player module. This will allow me to upload and embed videos using JW Player natively in Drupal.

I could have also used Flowplayer for this (and the flowplayer module).

I ended up deciding to use psuedo HTTP streaming for my video files (mp4). I could have used a streaming server, but it would have required more integration work. Here's a good article on the various streaming servers available.

In order to support psuedo streaming (basically, splitting up a video via HTTP), I am going to use an IIS 7 module for it. IIS is probably a less frequent case for Drupal, but there are modules for the web server of your choice available here.