Blog: Video

If you're not in Washington, DC tonight or just can't break away, you can still follow what's happening at the Drupal meetup. Ron will be streaming the presentations on Ustream, and I'll be streaming some videos to Qik, like this one. We'll be sending out notifications of when we're streaming via twitter here and here, but it will likely be from about 7:30 to 8:30 pm tonight.

Improving the Workflow and Usability of Multilingual Video Subtitles

Last week I posted about adding multilingual subtitles to video content using JW FLV Media Player and Drupal. The workflow I described involves attaching a W3C Timed-Text XML file to a node using an upload form. It’s great for initial translations because you can take advantage of a desktop captioning tool, but what happens when you need to make small changes or corrections? We decided that requiring the user to download the file, edit it, and re-upload it was a major usability issue.

My solution is to parse the contents of the Timed-Text file into a CCK field so it can be manipulated directly on the node editing form. The uploaded file is parsed and the CCK field is populated right before your eyes using an AJAX callback, and the interface allows users to add additional lines of captions dynamically thanks to some logic borrowed from the Link module. Once the node is saved, the CCK field can be used with a custom views style plugin to display a fully formatted Timed-Text XML file.

You can watch what I did in this screencast:

Make Video More Content More Accessible

We're working on a site build for a client who publishes an enormous amount of text content in six different languages. Their collection of videos, however, is currently only available on the English version of the site. Since the videos are very useful to all of their audiences, we set out to find a way to make them more accessible.

We found the solution in JW FLV Media Player, a robust tool that has already proven itself in the Drupal community. Here is an example of what our main video play landing page looks like right now for the client.

The player's subtitle feature parses an XML document based on the W3C Timed-Text specification, which allows you to specify the start time and end time of each line of text. Several applications capable of authoring these XML files are listed towards the bottom of JW's Accessibility page.


<:tt xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1" xmlns:tts="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1#style">
<:body>
<:div xml:id="captions">
<:p begin="00:00:19" end="00:00:22">Je trouve très inquiétant que le monde<:/p>
<:p begin="00:00:22" end="00:00:24">semble pas au courant de l'ampleur du problème<:/p>
<:p begin="00:00:24" end="00:00:25">de disparitions au Sri Lanka.<:/p>

<:p begin="00:00:26" end="00:00:27.5">Il n'existe pas de chiffres,<:/p>
<:p begin="00:00:27.5" end="00:00:31">mais le nombre de cas que nous avons documentés<:/p>
<:/div>
<:/body>
<:/tt>


Using this feature, the Internationalization module (i18n), and some CCK configurations we were a able to have our video player automatically display subtitles to users browsing the site in a non-English language.

We began with node type called video with two CCK filefields. One is used to upload and store an FLV video file. The i18n module works by cloning a master node for each translation. Since the video file is identical for each language, we've configured the field to be synchronized among all translated nodes. The second file field will hold the Timed-Text XML document. This field should not be synchronized because each translation will need to reference a different file.

After you add a video node, create a translation and upload a subtitle file. There are various ways to pass the file to JW Player, but the important logic is "if there is a subtitle file attached, tell JW player about it." If you're just using the stand alone player to display one video at a time, a simple JavaScript call will suffice. Here is an example of subtitles in French.

Use FeedAPI, Feed Element Mapper, and Embedded Media Field to Aggregate Video from Blip.tv

Sean Effel from Drupal Therapy just put up a wonderful screencast on how to pull blip.tv videos from RSS feeds into Drupal. In the screencast, Sean shows step by step how to set up your Drupal  site with the FeedAPI, Feed Element Mapper, and Embedded Media Field modules to aggregate video feeds from blip.tv.

If you're interested in pulling video into your website or online app, you'll definitely want to check this out.

Streamlined, Centralized Drupal Building Logic

Last month at DrupalCon Boston I presented with Jeff Miccolis on implementing a formal context system in Drupal. We had a lot of ideas to share and some proof of concept code to demo. Since then we’ve been working hard to clean up our code and our concepts.

The basic idea behind the context module is to allow different parts of the Drupal stack to expose key pieces of logic to other parts in a standardized fashion. Context_ui extends this core functionality by allowing users to create context definitions - bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks - that can be used to model “sections” or “features” on your Drupal site, among other things.

Adding realtime metadata to videos

Below is a two minute video clip from Bill O'Reilly's May 11th episode of The Talking Points Memo. No, our beliefs haven't done an about face. I was experimenting with Viddler.com and decided to use it to fact check O'Reilly's show. I went in and, right on the video clip itself (thanks Viddler), tagged it and added comments to expose O'Reilly's bogus commentary. But why take my word? The video gets smarter as more metadata is added, so why don't you fact check my facts and post them as comments and add a few tags while you're in there? Just scroll over the dots in the segment to read my comments.