HN Explorer

Ask HN: Are there any good media management systems available?

4 points by mdasen ↗ HN
I have been tasked with finding or creating a media management database to store and serve audio, video, and images ala a Flickr/YouTube like site. On one side, we have staff members who are trusted to add content that will be featured and all. On the other, we want individual users to upload content to share and comment on and such.

This isn't a project to take over the world or anything like that - we won't be competing with YouTube, Flickr, et. al. It doesn't need to scale to high concurrency and so a nice Rails application that allowed users to upload media and transcoded it, administrators to sort through it, comments to be applied to the media, etc. would be ideal.*

If you were going to be hosting some social video, audio, and images, what software would you use?

*That's not any judgement on whether Rails can scale: more a judgement that we don't need things like sharding or some fancy storage interface or some transcoding process that will handle large volumes of video.

2 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] thread
johnnyb
Have you taken a look at Miro Community? http://www.mirocommunity.org/

It's open source, Django, and seems to do a lot of what you want in terms of video. Given Django's ease of use, it probably wouldn't be too hard to extend it to also handle photos and audio.

mdasen
Miro is really nice. The issue is mostly just that, as data policy, we require ourselves to host/control/backup our data. Miro seems to be about a front-end for YouTube where users can comment and see the videos in your site. And that's wonderful for a lot of people, but it isn't what we're looking for since our policy is that we need to host the video ourselves.

I don't necessarily agree with the policy, but I understand it: other sites could take a video down that we don't want to lose or we don't have control over things like watermarks or whatnot or YouTube could (conceivably) break Miro in the future. That last one might not even be on purpose - if Miro is relying on YouTube acting a certain way and they change it, it could leave us scrambling a tad to get it working again.