The MediaCore blog

We are readying the first draft of the project goals for the MediaCore Video CMS. Feel free to read them over and comment. We’re looking for community feedback.

Goals

• All-in-One Video and Podcasting: To produce a powerful and easy-to-use Open Source video and podcast platform that can scale to meet anyone’s needs
• Open Source: To remain freely usable for both open source and proprietary applications. We will continue to license MediaCore using the GPL v3.0 license. In addition, we will strive to create an environment that is friendly to both newcomers and developers. We will continue defining a new standard for open source projects, which communicates with its communities. We will use github, twitter (@simplestation), facebook, google groups, and our forums to build community and provide avenues for feedback.
• Usability: To work in accordance with good user interface design principles that ensure MediaCore will be usable by the broadest range of users including those with disabilities. We want both our marketing website and our platform to set a high bar for usability and become a role model for other Open Source projects.
• Standards Compliance: To comply with relevant web standards, and to embrace new standards as they evolve. We aim to create one of the most accessible web platforms on the net today.
• Compatibility: To maintain graded browser support for standards compliant browsers
• Showcase the Power of Python: To showcase Python as a programming language of choice for developing web applications

MediaCore is used on Indie Music for Haiti to promote indie bands who are willing to donate their music to the people of Haiti. The concept for the site is that members of the general public can come and view videos submitted by indie artists, and if they like the videos they can donate to Voice of Haiti which is a non-profit group helping on the ground in Haiti.

MediaCore is integrated into the site and is used in combination with WordPress, which controls the homepage blog. The latest videos are automatically pulled from MediaCore and displayed in WordPress in a grid format. (See the first screenshot with 8 images pulled from MediaCore at the top)

Here’s what is special about how IndieMusicForHaiti.com is using MediaCore:

• Customized MediaCore theme
• Users can upload videos or submit YouTube or Vimeo URL’s
• Integration with WordPress.
• Videos are embeddable

Integrating WordPress with MediaCore is quite easy. We’ve got a number of plugins written for WordPress, which we are now testing and hope to release soon. If you are interested in beta testing our plugins please sign up for our beta testers mailing list.

We have been getting a lot of questions lately about how to encode videos to flash for inclusion in MediaCore. Not everyone has the money to buy Adobe Flash or Adobe Flash Media Encoder. After some quick research we found that Riva makes a great free encoder that you can use for all your video encoding.

Links:

• Windows: Riva Encoder
• Mac: FFMpeg X Encoder

I just noticed that MediaCore was highlighted as a featured project on GitHub Rebase last month. Thanks GitHub team!

http://rebase.github.com/37.html

We are pleased to announce we will be working on a project for AssistiveTechnolgy.tv to make MediaCore even more accessible for individuals with disabilities. The features we will be working on will include:

• Revising categories to make them more accessible and also to provide administrators with the ability to create categories and subcategories. There will be no limit to the number of subcategories a category can have. Both the administrative interface and the front-end interface will see revisions to accommodate these changes.
• Integrating JW Player with closed captioning and audio descriptions. We will be completely overhauling the add file dialogue in the administrative interface to accommodate these changes.
• Allowing users to choose which player they would like to use. Options will include: FlowPlayer, JWPlayer, and HTML5

All of these changes will be worked into the main branch for the next major release. Due to the size of these changes it will likely push our previous mid-March release date back a few weeks.

If you are a developer and would prefer to use Google Groups instead of our community forums we now have a development mailing list.