Development priorities

Ourmedia 2.0 is less concerned with where or how people host their video, but more with what they are saying and how they're collaborating. We want to be the community hub for grassroots creativity, even as the actual videos are hosted on a bevy of other sites.

Here is the official list of Development priorities for Ourmedia (see also Developer Tasks for specific details:

Media RSS

• Owner: Markus.
• Will be addressed in Ourmedia Upgrade to Drupal 5.0
• Status: Done. These are now available for both media and channels.

Registration

• Owner: Outhink engineering team
• Now that Ourmedia is giving users a choice of destination upload sites, we need to decouple Ourmedia registration from the Internet Archive's registration, which has been a major thorn in our side since we launched.

Upload to multiple destinations

• Owner: Eric Z at Outhink
• We'll need to give users the ability to publish to additional sites thru SpinXpress.

Upgrade To Drupal 5

• Owners: Markus
• Status: In progress, we are now using Drupal 5.1 for channels and tools. Much of the old site functionality has been replaced by the new channels site. Some 4.6 functionality remains, but is being optimized and upgraded as needed. See Ourmedia Upgrade and Developer Tasks.

Editing pages

• Owner: Markus looking into it as part of Ourmedia Upgrade
• When any user edits a media page, all the tags (keywords) disappear, and the member must re-enter them.
• Also, when you edit a media page, the publication date reverts to today's date instead of the date entered when the file was first published. Another bug.
• The same is true for blog entries: when you editing a blog entry the date also reverts to the day of editing. This can be seen when looking at someone's RSS feed.
• Update 13.08.06: One more metadata/transfer bug is that "Audio Type" is always set to "Mixed programs" no matter what a user chooses when uploading the file.

Support for video codecs

Owner: Outhink engineering team??

Notice how 90% of the video previews on the site don't show up? That's because we've only built in support for QuickTime .mov, but for no other codec, on the media pages. See this example. It should take only a few minutes each to add support for mp4, m4v, divx, real, etc. See Embedded Media for more details.

Track Issue

Note from Markus: I have resolved many of these issues through a combination of bug fixes and more uniform support for common codecs. We now support DivX, Windows Media, MPEG, Quicktime and Flash.

Drupal fields

In the Description field of any media page, there's no current way to recognize paragraph breaks or html coding such as a link. This applies to both the website Publish my media forms and the Ourmedia Publisher. Does Drupal 4.7.2 fix this?

markus: this will be addressed in the 5.0 migration

Weekly newsletter & podcast Communication with members

Owners: JD and Ty West

We'll do a twice-a-month newsletter and podcast. We need to figure out (a) how to gather together all the email addresses of our members, and (b) what kind of email newsletter app to use.

Search and License search

• Owner: Outhink (Eric, Chris and Markus)
• Get Media for SpinXpress partners to replace current Google Search.
• Also looking into using Lucene in various ways (SpinXpress, Archive, Drupal)
• Ourmedia needs a search/browse by license capability.
• Also, Drew Roberts or FastSearch

Tasks accomplished

• Scott Lloyd and Markus Sandy have stablized the site.
• Scott has set up a temporary development area on one of his own servers. It is the beginnings of a development staging and test area.
• We now have an Ourmedia gmail account, and email addresses, here.
• We now have an active issues and bug tracker at Google Code.
• Markus fixed the Creative Commons/Traditional copyright license bug (for version 2.5 only).

Bigger projects

Here's the initial list of projects that will follow the bug fixes above (we'll explain these in more detail before we tackle them):

• New UI/redesign to make it more of a community site that highlights partner media sites (and make it easy for partners to program areas of front page) and open media/community projects. Includes playlists module on front page. JD working on mockup.
• Channels! (collections) and tagging -- collections not just to organize and highlight quality media but to allow groups (like Alliance for Community Media or Democrats for Barak Obama or musical groups) to create homesteads on Ourmedia
• WordPress?? integration for customizable blogs and as part of the new community approach.
• cut and paste your Ourmedia collection onto your own blog, MySpace
• program Spin to support multiple file uploads to destination sites (display as sets)
• Ratings and rankings through partnership with outside vendor like Loomia
• Playlists module
• Digg-like UI, giving audience control over site's makeup and display of their own My Pages
• transcoding/conversion of files into other formats, for playing on ipod, PSP, other devices
• mobile blogging and mobile comments, etc.
• BitTorrent support

Related

• Ourmedia should host, and partner with other sites to co-host, a conference around user-created video and podcasts.
• Project owners: We now have an active Issue Tracker at Google Code. Please list your project there.

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Valentin on 8-8-06 added these suggested priorities for bug fixes:

rss feed, wrong licenses, wrong dates

since someone asked about what the priorities should be, here what i see from my moderator's point of view:

• the missing rss feed seems to be one of the biggest problems for the users, specially podcasters. Track Issue

• when editing a published file the date reverts to the day of editing and all tags get lost. but even if you fix this manually every time you edit your file (most people don't do that), the wrong date still shows up in the user's rss feed (date of editing = day of publishing; only the date on top of the file's media page always shows the correct date. and there are two different date fields when you edit a file's metadata, maybe this is part of the problem.