[consulting] Host a video contest in Drupal

[Domenic Santangelo]

> There's one thing to add. I don't know if things have changed since I
> checked it about a 1+ year ago. AFAIK most popular video hosting
> services re-encode the video you upload to a format that you've little
> control over. All of them always provide a FLV version. The <video>
> tag is supported only on modern browsers and the dust regarding video
> codec formats and the concomitant patent trolling involved is very
> much in the air.

Indeed, this is the complication around self-hosting videos, Drupal or not, especially when dealing with community-generated content. If it's just you posting videos, you can just be sure you always export FLV/WMA/MP4/whatever, but you can't enforce that effectively in the community -- you need a transcoder. There are many 3rd-party services that will do this: someone else mentioned Kaltura (which had Drupal integration in its absolute infancy last time I used it), CDN2 from WorkHabit, and so forth. You could even roll your own (community tools for transcoding exist), but it's extremely complicated to account for each corner case. I've been involved with doing this, too; believe me, it's a nightmare.

At this point in time, it's far easier for everyone involved to choose a provider and let them deal with the video mess: "Upload your video to YouTube and paste the link here". It's honestly not so much a failing of Drupal as it is the state of the technology. Antonio mentioned patent problems around codecs, which is a salient point, browser support is fairly sketchy so you have to choose a player, probably flash, which will cost a ton and/or support 1-2 file formats (which means you need transcoding, see the previous paragraph).

Food for thought.

-D