Plone and video content

Introduction

Site based on default Plone configuration can be extended to support video content.

There are few solutions to present videos in Plone:

• p4a.plonevideoembed
• Products.FlashVideo
• collective.flowplayer

I prefer collective.flowplayer, because it's light, user-friendly and up-to-date. This product integrates flowplayer ver. 3 (on GPL license) - it can play AVI, MP3 and MP4 media files.

Few days ago I made additional module - stxnext.transform.avi2flv. It converts videos in AVI format to FLV. This conversion is made automatically, when editor uploads file recognized as AVI.

Requirements

stxnext.transform.avi2flv uses FFmpeg. It must be installed with mp3 (lame) nad flv support.

To install it on Ubuntu 9.04 you have to run:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-unstripped-52

On CentOS 5.3 command is even simpler:

sudo yum install ffmpeg

Installation

Plone's 3.3 standard buildout must be extended only with few lines:

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    ...
    stxnext.transform.avi2flv
    collective.flowplayer

[zope2]
...
additional-fake-eggs =
    collective.testcaselayer


[instance]
...
zcml =
    ...
    stxnext.transform.avi2flv
    collective.flowplayer

After rebuild and restart of instance this two products must be also activated. Go to Site Setup -> Add/Remove Products and install Avi2flv Transform Install.

Configuration

Options for FFmpeg that controls quality of output video can be configured via ZMI. Go to http:/example.org/site/portal_transforms/avi_to_flv/manage_main

With default configuration it will execute command similar to:

ffmpeg -i "input.avi" -y -b 1024k -r 25 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 'output.flv'

Description of these options and more control parameters you can find in FFmpeg manual.