Last month, I was hired to find a solution for a client that was building a new website. The organization was two weeks away from launch and a major Drupal module, Flashvideo, had stopped the development team dead in their tracks. They needed a solution fast.
I learned a lot from six days spent testing and retesting Flashvideo. According to the Drupal project page the module is a complete turn-key video solution that expands Drupal’s upload capabilities to allow web developers and users to upload video files, automatically convert those videos to the popular Flash format, and then embed their video in any node type using the simple [video] tag. The module is about four years old and thus there is a lot of information available online and a lot of that information is outdated or pertains to previous updates of the module.
There are also a couple of videos of the Drupal Flashvideo module and how to install it. Most are at least two years old. Part of the problem with Flashvideo is that the module depends on two other elements. FFmpeg is a binary application that must be installed on the server. Most hosting services charge additional for the application – not my service – and installing it on a test server such as WAMP or MAMP can be a real challenge.
So assuming a correctly installed FFmpeg, the next problem is the player. During the four years that Flashvideo has been versioning from Drupal 5, many changes have occurred. So if you depend on a two year old video, you will find at the end of the installation that it does not work. This is exactly what happened with my client.
When you go to the Drupal forums and various blogs you will find numerous problems that have been found and solved, but only a couple of them may really solve the problems – Yes, problems for the more recent versions of Flashvideo. There are essentially three that I found – FFmpeg commands, content type added fields, and the video player.
FFmpeg has been versioning just as Drupal has, so the default command in the Flashvideo > Content Type Setting > FFMPEG settings is likely wrong. If you are using a recent version of FFmpeg you may need to change the command line to replace “mp3” with “libmp3lame”. At any rate you will need to understand the commands for FFmpeg to make the conversion do what you want.
Content type is the second problem. In the original any number of videos could be placed on the node to include the original video and the converted flash version. But that process no longer seems to work. The original upload video content type needs to have under the “display fields “ the type excluded.
Flashvideo display settings for content type fvideo
Last is the player problem. The whole time that Flashvideo has been versioning, the media player has been drastically changing as well. With a whole lot of work you can get the original Flowplayer to work with Flashvideo, but then you will not have the poster image only a black screen. Even worse is that if you turn on Jquery with SWF Tools, your Views module no longer works. So I strongly recommend the JW_player. You will need to install the jwplayermodule, but it is worth the effort and the added cost. The player retails for $89. With JWplayer 5.5 you can insert video into any content type. The instructions are in a PDF for Drupal with the download. It is a very nifty solution that uses file attachment. After you have installed the JWplayer module you will need to put a copy of player.swf from the JWplayer directory into the directory where the videos are output and rename it “Player.swf”.
It took six days of trial and error to get to this solution. Good luck with your flashvideo install.
Sample Flashvideo on Compton Communications Drupal site – http://www.comptoncoms.com/cc/content/welcome-compton-communications-video .
