Collaborations on the Open Media Project

- Reservation System: (http://drupal.org/project/merci)

Every public access center needs a way to manage reservations for their equipment and resources.  Davis Media Access has contributed a number of enhancements for public access to better integrate their volunteer information and volunteer produced content with the MERCI reservation system.

- CiviEvent Status CiviGroup sync: http://www.openmediaproject.org/code/civievent-status-civigroup-sync

Permissions for volunteers to reserve various equipment items is based on group membership.  I.e. if the volunteer is a member of the Field 1 group they may reserve camcorders for use in their productions.  Volunteers gain these group memberships by completing workshops.   This module automates this process.  Previously once a volunteer completed a workshop staff had to first mark them as attended in the workshop.  Then staff had to go add them to the proper group.  This module automatically adds them to the correct group once the volunteer is marked as attended for the appropriate workshop.

- Merci Views: http://drupal.org/project/merci

DMA staff created this module to provide better reporting for existing and upcoming reservations.  Funding for this project was provided by the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation http://www.gmcvo.org.uk/.

- Tightrope Cablecast integration with OM Show.

OM Show is the content type holding the metadata for our volunter produced content.  DMA staff worked closely with the vendor of our playback server to integrate this metadata with the tightrope cablecast metadata.  DMA wrote the module which syncs data between the two systems.  Tightrope developer Ray Tiley worked on providing the proper API withing the tightrope system to make this possible.

- Partnership with Amherst Community Television.

Of the 8 beta partners within the Open Media Project only four have followed through and developed their websites using the OMP modules.  Amherst has a identical setup to DMA.  Both use tightrope systems and both require a open source offline encoder.  Amherst and DMA work closely together to share as much code and knowledge as possible.  It is quite mutually beneficial.

- Offline asynchronous encoding.

DMA created software to handle the encoding of video for Drupal asynchronously in batch mode via a seperate server.  http://www.openmediaproject.org/code/encodephp-installed-when-using-ffmp... Encoding a video file takes a huge amount of resources.  Doing the encoding on the web server hosting the Drupal site is not practical and would most likely bog down the site.  The remote ffmpeg encoder is a system which listens for commands from the Drupal website which tells it which video files to encode, where the source files are located, where to save the encoded file to and what encoding to use for the file.  Once done the encoder pings back to Drupal where the open media show record is updated with the newly encoded file.

- PBCore intergration.

In order for stations to share their content a standardize method for describing the content is required.  For the Open Media Project this standard is PBCore: http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/UserGuide.html.  PBCore defines a set of terms for catagorizing the content (i.e. Community, Sports, News, etc.), rattings (TV-G, etc.) and also encoding, date created and so on.  DMA staff has developed the PBCore drupal module http://drupal.org/project/pbcore implementing this standard within Drupal.

- Archive.org integration

DMA is a partner in a grant proposal with Creative Commons to develop software for automating uploads to archive.org. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Grants/CC_Uploader_for_Drupal