MediaCore video site software

[localzuk]

So, I've been playing with MediaCore with the idea being to set up an internal video streaming site, to centralise the storage of movies.

 

I've now got it running nicely on an ubuntu box, storing the data on our ISCSI SAN device, using its built in 'development server' rather than hosting it via apache (which is where I want to end up).

 

Its a nice piece of software, but has a few limitations at the moment. Namely inability to transcode videos itself from whatever format that gets uploaded into flv or mp4 etc... so that they stream nicely. Instead, an admin has to download any non-streaming videos, transcode them and then upload them.

 

Has anyone else played with this software? Any tips or advice?

[localzuk]

No-one else looked at this great software then?

[Soulfish]

We've recently been setting it up here as well. Haven't had much of a chance to play with it though unfortunately. It does seem like a great piece of software, albeit not the easiest to install from behind a proxy .

 

The lack of auto-transcoding is a shame, but it does seem that it's on the development roadmap so hopefully it won't be too long before its included.

[chris_uk]

You could write your own script to convert the file with ffmpeg?

[localzuk]

We've recently been setting it up here as well. Haven't had much of a chance to play with it though unfortunately. It does seem like a great piece of software, albeit not the easiest to install from behind a proxy .

 

The lack of auto-transcoding is a shame, but it does seem that it's on the development roadmap so hopefully it won't be too long before its included.

 

If you've had a play with it, make sure you update to the latest version 0.9.0beta. It fixes a few annoying issues, and introduces a few new configuration options.

 

Transcoding shouldn't be too hard for the authors to write into it, as they could hook ffmpeg up to some form of script which runs periodically in a queue system. We'll see how it goes.

 

 

You could write your own script to convert the file with ffmpeg?

 

I don't know enough python to contemplate doing that at the moment.

[Soulfish]

If you've had a play with it, make sure you update to the latest version 0.9.0beta. It fixes a few annoying issues, and introduces a few new configuration options.

Will have to do that - we were playing with it here just before Christmas. Then the snow + Christmas happened so haven't had a chance to play with it properly. We're still using it via the development web server as well.

 

 

You could write your own script to convert the file with ffmpeg?

I don't know enough python to contemplate doing that at the moment.

 

Hmmm I'm now very tempted to get back into writing python and see if I can knock something together Time to go read up on how Mediacore/ffmpeg work

[chris_uk]

For FFMPEG you could just do,

 

ffmpeg -i input.avi -ab 56 -ar 44100 -b 200 -r 15 -s 320x240 -f flv output.flv 

 

You could push it a little bit more, if you ran,

 

ffmpeg -i input.avi

 

it would give you all of the information, screen size, etc etc. That could then be piped into the converting script so that it doesn't mess the size.

Edited January 25, 2011 by chris_uk
forgot to close tags

[localzuk]

For FFMPEG you could just do,

 

ffmpeg -i input.avi -ab 56 -ar 44100 -b 200 -r 15 -s 320x240 -f flv output.flv 

 

You could push it a little bit more, if you ran,

 

ffmpeg -i input.avi

 

it would give you all of the information, screen size, etc etc. That could then be piped into the converting script so that it doesn't mess the size.

 

The FFMPEG bit isn't the difficult bit, its the getting it into MediaCore, so that files uploaded get added to the queue with the right info, and then get put back on the correct item in the database when they're converted.

[chris_uk]

Not sure how MediaCore works.

 

I have a lighttpd web server set up here, we copy all of the videos (ok we've already converted them to flv) to the box, then at about 9pm it imports all of the videos into the correct subjects. It generates the thumbnails, duration and injects meta data so that you can scrub forward and back and then saves the video information to MySQL.

 

We have a 1.2GB video file of a performance for students to be able to see. They can scrub forward and back with out the need of it downloading all of the video first.

 

You could set up a nightly cron job to convert the videos, bit of hack code,

ls *.avi | sed 's/.avi//' | while read a; do
ffmpeg -i $a.avi -sameq $a.flv