Video on a website never seems to be easy.  There are so many formats, so many options and so many requirements for upload, encoding and displaying. It makes it apparent that the Drupal leadership vision on how video technology would be added to Drupal, so a kind of free-for-all resulted. In Drupal 6, the options and complexity for adding video are perplexing.   Since Drupal is designed to be a community builder, most modules aim in the direction of user contributed content.  So when it comes to video supplied from a number of different sources and devices, any solution can get very complicated and confusing fast.  Part of the problem seems to be the differing approaches that module developers have taken toward handling video.  Some look for simple solutions that handle the embedding of a video file in a page or node, some want complete manipulation video fomat with wide variety of codecs and some want to use external vendors like YouTube to handle it all.

Previously my approach with most websites I have developed, is to use an application like Gallery2 that handles both images and video well and then try to integrate these into the site. This method puts limits on the users as to encode formats, but gives me maximum control.  It is, however, a poor solution for a broad group of users.  In the Smoky Canyon site, I integrated Gallery 1 using a wrapper built into the page template.   Since there were only a few users involved, it works fine.  For a later site, I used Coppermine, since it offered more options especially with video feeds.  There is now a better way to integrate these two. 

Kirk Designs has a great roundup of video for Drupal 6 that summarizes all the various options.  For my new site, I wanted to test the main module choices, but ran into difficulties with each module. Drupal 6 video module is perhaps the best, but it has the limitation of needing FFMpeg app installed on your hosting server to handle transcoding.  Video module also has a long list of requirements for proper configuration and playing the video.  I attempted to load the FFMpeg on a wampserver2 for testing, but it proved so “simple — NOT — that I abandoned that project halfway through.  The module does have complete details on setting up the video module and configuring it to play .FLV files.

The second module is Flashvideo.  An good video show one how this module is installed, configured and used.  It points out that the advanced help files will be needed to learn how to use special tags to embed the files.  Again this system jumps out of the simple category when you look at what is need to build a test server and load the FFMpeg binary.  This module also requires use of a SWF player and placing that player in the proper area for use on the site.

The last method is the Embedded Media Field.  This method takes out all the complexity of building a video upload, file conversion and page display parts of the video system by moving those functions to a third party such as YouTube.  Users must first upload to a the third-party service, get the proper tags and then add them to the Drupal page.

These are the main methods of getting video or streaming video on your Drupal pages – calling it “perplexing” might be too polite.