About three months ago I posted about Denver Open Media's initial results integrating with Archive.org via the Internet Archive module -- at that point we had transferred 348 shows to archive.org. As of today, we have now transferred 2746 shows, almost 2TB of data. The majority of denveropenmedia.org's on demand video content is now progressively streamed from archive.org, and more than 2/3rds of our video content (including broadcast files) is available via our collection at Archive.org.
Even more exciting is the fact that we turned off our video encoder and disabled our previous video workflow process (media mover) two weeks ago. Due to amazing support from Archive.org, particularly the work of Tracey Jaquith, we no longer have to do any encoding locally. Any file submitted to sub-collections of the Open Media Project collection can now apply to have uploaded content encoded, not only for the web, but as a broadcast quality MPEG2 based on the ACM Preliminary Video File & Metadata Standards.
Our video ingest workflow at DOM is now:
- Producer exports/saves their raw video from DVD, Final Cut, or any source, to our local storage (RAID)
- Producer creates a show on denveropenmedia.org, selects their raw video file and enters information about their show.
- The Internet Archive module harvests the raw video using a standard Drupal view, and transfers it to Archive.org using their S3 API
- Archive.org encodes the file in a series of new formats including an OGG, MPEG4, broadcast MPEG2 and generates thumbnails.
- Once Archive.org's encoding process is complete, the new download submodule of the Internet Archive module downloads the broadcast MPEG2 file and stores it locally, in our case to a filefield on the show node, ready to be scheduled on our broadcast server.
In theory, the above workflow combined with the internet archive modules remote submodule should allow a media center to handle media file storage, backup, encoding, on-demand streaming and sharing, provided they meet a few requirements.
1. Because of the file sizes, you need a decent internet connection (5Mbs or more ideally)
2. A basic web server with apache and access to your local video file storage.
3. A Drupal website hosted locally or by a remote webhost
Then, in order to submit content to the Open Media Project Collection, all that is required is that the files have a creative commons license.
From the beginning, this solution was designed to facilitate content-sharing among stations, espcially automated, rules-based sharing that could automatically share top-rated content, or subject-specific content across stations. I believe a few other stations are storing or starting to store content on archive.org (Humboldt, BAVC, CTN), and some have committed to Creative Commons licensing but I'm not aware of anyone storing metadata & licensing with their content yet that would make it easy for us to automatically pull it down here at Denver Open Media. If anyone is interested in sharing, please reply here and I'll be happy to make minor modifications to the module or try to help you overcome any other barriers you might be worried about.
Brian