Media Mover Workflow needs
I’ve been playing around with Media Mover this week for Arthur with the goal of improving the general use cases for the community and giving some code review.
For those who don’t know, here is an excerpt from the project page of media mover:
Media Mover is a set of modules which allows website administrators to easily create complex file conversion processes. The core of Media Mover is the media_mover_api module which creates a set of rules allowing multiple modules to interact with a file. Media Mover can take a file emailed to an email account, turn a file attachment into an FLV file, create a new node with the file data, and then save the file on an external file storage like Amazon’s S3 all at once. And that’s just the start.
Wow! So does mm live up the hype? Of course. Arthur wrote it. 
What I’ve been looking into the integration of Media Mover with workflow-ng and asset. Media Mover’s strengths right now are harvesting from multiple sources like ftp servers, email accounts, local stores, etc… and processing the video / audio / image via ffmpeg.
I’d say the main weakness it has is a drupal waekness, and that is how do files exist in the drupal node paradigm? Where is their meta-data stored?
There are so many different ways people do this task, generally with modules like image or video (which is basically file as a node). Or with modules like videofield, imagefield, etc which is file in files table, and a reference from a CCK field.
This kinda works, but asset provides a much more robust media integration framework, wherein an asset has metadata, it has formatting options and it can be embeded in the text body, or attached as a cck value.
The first goal of the integration is use the store hook in media mover to store the incoming media as an asset. Secondly, we’re going to build a store function to create a new node, and place the asset in a CCK field for that node.
The ultimate scenario is to create multiple assets for multiple processing instructions, so we have a folder of low res videos and a folder of high res videos, and we are automagically somehow adding the created assets to CCK fields (think I have a store selling video, and I have a “preview” CCK asset field and a “full version” CCK asset field).
There is inherent data model problems here both with asset and MM, but let’s see what we can do.
More next week when I’ve written the module, but if any Media Mover users are reading this, how is your experience with MM? What do you perceive as its lackings (if any) and what can be done to make it simpler / more intuitive for you?
-J
