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Blue Droplet Video and Storage API now support RTMP streaming with Amazon CloudFront.

The 'Stream with CloudFront' option can be enabled when creating an S3 container, or when editing an existing one. You need CloudFront enabled in your AWS account. Streaming with CloudFront will not work immediately as it takes several minutes to setup a CloudFront distribution.

Streaming will only work with MP4 video. The old FLV format is not supported.

This functionality requires the latest development snapshots of Flowplayer, BDV and Storage API. You can try it out at SharkScopers.

Storage API now supports serving with Amazon CloudFront.

CloudFront is the CDN for Amazon S3. It has 14 edge locations:

• United States - Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO
• Europe - Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London
• Asia - Hong Kong; Tokyo

To use CloudFront, you need the latest development snapshot of Storage API. It will be in Storage API 6.x-1.2 when it is released.

The 'Serve with CloudFront' option can be enabled when creating an S3 container, or when editing an existing one. You need CloudFront enabled in your AWS account. Serving with CloudFront will not start immediately as it takes several minutes to setup a CloudFront distribution. CloudFront is polled during cron and S3 is used for serving until it is setup.

Secure serving (time limited, cryptographically signed URLs - like with S3) is supported by CloudFront, but this is not yet implemented in Storage API.

One of the best sites that uses Blue Droplet Video and Storage API is SharkScopers.

I wrote up a showcase detailing how I helped SharkScope put it together.

Blue Droplet Video now uses Flowplayer instead of JW FLV Media Player to play videos in-browser.

This functionality was sponsored by SportsHD Productions.

From May 7, Blue Droplet Video snapshots will depend on the Flowplayer module (by Rob Loach). It has a javascript colour selector. Make sure you have installed and enabled it before upgrading Blue Droplet Video.

You might also want to configure the new player on its global configuration page under site configuration, and also in the Blue Droplet Video field configuration.

Flowplayer is free software (sort of), is highly skinnable, and has really great javascript integration.

I have created a new site called Planet Drupal TV that aggregates Drupal video feeds in a manner similar to how Planet Drupal aggregates Drupal blog posts. Videos can be viewed in-browser or downloaded. There is a "most popular" section that utilizes the fantastic Radioactivity module.

It utilizes my Blue Droplet Video module and its Feed API integration.

I've added all the Drupal video feeds I could find, although it does not work with YouTube feeds as they do not use the enclosure tag. Miro can acquire video from YouTube, so it should be possible in future. Really, blip.tv is much better than YouTube, or you could use Blue Droplet which outputs the source video in the enclosure tag.

Duvien and myself are hosting the Drupal Scotland May 11th Meetup at Stills Gallery on Cockburn Street, Edinburgh.

I'll be presenting on Blue Droplet Video and Storage API.

I'm heading to DrupalCon DC next week. There are loads of video-related things going on. I posted a full list on the Drupal Video group.

There will be a OpenPackage Video BoF - hope to see loads of people there!

Follow http://twitter.com/openpackage to coordinate during the week.

OpenPackage Video 5.x-3.15 has been released.

The major new feature of this release is MP4 encoding with H.264 video and AAC audio. These codecs have much higher performance than than the old FLV and MP3. This means you can have the same quality for less bandwidth or higher quality for the same bandwidth.

Demo

MP4 encoding is supported both with FFmpeg transcoding on your own server and with the paid transcoding service we offer at openpackage.biz .

This functionality was sponsored by SharkScopers and vertikal.dk .

You can select the MP4 format under 'transcoding parameters' in the video field configuration. You need to have run update.php if upgrading.

For MP4 videos, the user must have Flash 9 or greater to play MP4. OpenPackage Video automatically ensures that a recent enough version is installed.

If you are handling transcoding on your own server using FFmpeg, you need to make sure that your installation of FFmpeg has the required codecs. Once you have upgraded to 5.x-3.15, go to admin/settings/op_video . Important output formats and codecs are now highlighted. Make sure you can output the libfaac audio codec and the libx264 video codec. You also need qt-faststart, which is bundled with FFmpeg. See our FFmpeg documentation for more info.

Of course, if you use our remote transcoding service, you don't have to worry about configuring FFmpeg.

OpenPackage Media has just released a new module called OpenPackage YouTube syndication.

This module allows video that is published using OpenPackage Video to be automatically syndicated to the YouTube 'branded garden'.

YouTube is termed a 'branded garden' because it is not possible to view YouTube content without being exposed to the YouTube brand. The term is derived from 'walled garden'.

Features

• Syndication of first op_video field, node title, body and tags, and YouTube category.
• Videos can be syndicated as 'private' on a per-node basis.
• Integration with token, custom_links, feedapi and mass node operations.

Sponsorship

Development of the module was sponsored by Hudson Street Media for deployment on their Capitol Hub website.

The Digital Fringe Festival (24 September - 12 October) is a celebration of Digital Art from around the world. Anyone is able to upload a video, audio or still Digital Art work and have it screened on a huge number of screens around Melbourne, Australia and various other locations worldwide.

They used OpenPackage Video to replace a custom media handler to streamline the process of people submitting video works.