Ever wanted to create a niche video site that operates like YouTube? Sounds daunting but Dave at Highwood Designs created the HWDVideoShare extension a number of years ago and it’s been going from strength to strength. This is one of my favourite extensions – a seriously impressive piece of work.
Once installed and configured users will be able to upload their own videos or insert ones from other services like YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo (amongst a tonne of others). It has all the usual stuff you would expect like templates, previews, a decent player (even a HTML5 player for those of you on iOS), ratings, comments, likes, social media integration, moderation, etc.
What makes this tool better than the rest is it’s integration with our favourite video softwares like mencoder, ffmpeg, etc on your linux box so it will take a user’s uploaded video, re-encode it according to your preferred parameters, make a thumbnail and publish. And it’s fast, VERY FAST. Not like the old days when it took 20 hours to encode a movie, this is more like a few minutes (OK, so we’re looking a shorter clips here, but what the hey!). To get the most out of it you really need a dedicated server or space on one (like a decent VPS) as video encoding uses up a load of CPU time and the files take up quite a bit of space. Your average shared host won’t have any of it.
We used this software successfully on teacherstv.ie.
Get the plugin from hwdmediashare.co.uk