Aaron Winborn

Embedded Media Field has grown exponentially in the last year since I've begun developing it. From its humble beginnings as a brainstorming session at DrupalCampNYC last spring, it has grown from a quirky method of make embedding YouTube videos easier for editors to a full-featured suite of modules allowing for drag-and-drop placement of third party videos, images, and audio clips.

Used on a wide range of sites, such as Air America, NRDC, and Drupal Dojo, the module is a flexible and powerful solution for embedding multimedia.

Read on for its strengths and weaknesses...

As referred to in YouTube API for Drupal on the Way, beeradb has now opened the YouTube API module for development. He and I have been working to polish it up and make it ready for release.

You can take a look at the YouTube search on this site if you want to try it out! You can currently search YouTube for tags or users from the form, and see the results right here.

Obviously, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are some cool things planned for it in the near term, such as integration with Media Mover, Embedded Media Field, and yes, Rob, I haven't forgotten about Annotation Field...

And of course, the holy grail of single site integration of a YouTube video upload from your browser...

I blogged briefly recently about YouTube's new and improved API. Soon thereafter, there was a flurry of discussion about creating a Google Summer of Code project to integrate it with Drupal, including a proposal that wasn't accepted, but I believe nothing further happened from that point.

Until now.

Brad Bowman (beeradb) has stepped up to the plate and created a YouTube API wrapper. He hasn't released it yet, though he indicated that he plans to early next week. I have had the honor of an early review, and it is nice to work with.

I set it up on a test server, and was able to upload a video to its file directory and have it also uploaded to YouTube, showing up in my user account almost immediately. The API also let me view my YouTube video user feed, so I could verify the results without leaving my site.

Additionally, when retrieving videos, you have access to everything stored at YouTube with that video, including video duration (as shown in the screen shot), description, and user comments.

Read on, anxious reader...

This list is partly to inform interested others of my personal Drupal plans this month, partly to get feedback, and partly as a reminder for myself when I see my blog. The order is roughly in order of priority for me. We'll see how it actually pans out...

• Finish writing Drupal Multimedia! (I've finished 10 of 12 chapters, so I'm on the home stretch...)
• Upgrade Embedded Media Field to Drupal 6. (There are several folks working on this, who have been instrumental in current progress.)
• Write the engine for 5 Second Game. (Morbus Iff has jumped on board as a co-developer, helping to ensure the highest quality for this fun project!)
• Expand GetID3 functionality. (Thanks to Rob Loach for his ideas and push to get that going. The next stage of development for this is to create an API to better handle Metatag storage.)
• Make a tutorial for XSPF Playlist + Views recipe. (I just finished writing an awesome tutorial for this in the book, but want to make a video tutorial available, probably for Drupal Dojo.)

There are other projects on the back-burner I'd like to get to as well, such as upgrading some of the other modules I work on, creating official releases, etc. I plan to revise this list next month, and see where things are.

You want to support a provider not included automatically with Embedded Media Field? Just can't wait for the maintainers of the module to write a new include file for FrenchBlingVideoMashup.TV? But you don't know RegEx parsing from red beets and parsnips?

Fret no more.

Soon, you will be able to build your own provider parser, with little more than the cut-and-paste you're already familiar with.

I am in the middle of creating Embedded Expression Engine (emexgine), which will compare the URLs and Embed codes from a third party content provider and turn them into a new option for your video, image, or audio fields.

Read on to find out more! (With cool, full-size, preview screenshots!)

Sean Effel from drupaltherapy.com recently created an excellent Feed API + Emfield Recipe video tutorial.

He shows you step-by-step how to take a video feed from Blip.TV (or any other provider supported by Embedded Media Field) and aggregate it on your own site, videos, thumbnails, and all, automatically turning the remote videos into nodes on your site, ready for theming, comments, and anything else you want.

See the Video!

The good folks at Zivtech (Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg and Jody Hamilton) have been plugging away at Embedded Media Field while I was away. It has bling now!

Check out their Drupal Video page. Click on a thumbnail, go ahead.

Thickbox!

Here's a screenshot, just in case you didn't do that yet:

It's in the latest dev version, so you should go grab that right now and spice up your site! (You'll need to have the Thickbox module installed as well.

Alex is promising a write-up tutorial soon, so watch out for it!

I've just created the jQuery Media and jMedia wrapper modules for those two jQuery plugins. I am excited about both of them, which are similar. I'm already using jQuery Media for the audio player for Air America Radio (to be launched next week), and found out about jMedia today while researching other uses for the plugin.

Basically, these plugins will replace links or other text with Multimedia, automatically compatible with the browser. They both support audio and video, and come packed with cool features that I haven't even finished exploring yet.

I'll show you how it works next week after Air America's launch. But I'll let you know, it's really, really cool. Makes developing multimedia intensive sites super easy. And I'll definitely have to put it in Drupal Multimedia, my book that should be published this summer.

I plan to support one or both of them in Embedded Media Field as well, as it should make theming that easier than it currently is. They both already support jQ out of the box, for easier administration.

And that's just the beginning...

Views as a Web Widget has the potential to revolutionize the Internet, now that I think about it. Taking a hint from Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites, we are entering a time where creating an API for embedding content within another site is becoming a standard way of sharing information.

The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.

The Views as a Web Widget project is being proposed for Google's 2008 Summer of Code. This project will allow an administrator to turn any view into a widget.

As I have experience with this, having implemented Views Slideshow (any view into a slideshow), Embedded Media Field (embedding external "widgets" from YouTube, Flickr, etc.), and a widget for Maplight, and am interested in being a mentor this year, I plan to offer to mentor that project, along with Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg.

Tim Berners-Lee spoke last week on the topic, saying that the semantic web will supersede the monolithic giants of Facebook and Google. As Dries recently indicated at his State of Drupal address in Boston, the Drupal of the future will be semantic web.

The Drupal of the Future will explode your site into a million pieces. And if your site can handle that, it will thrive in that multifaceted environment.

So YouTube just added some new features to their API:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

How does this apply to Embedded Media Field? And how about to Drupal as a whole?

Embedded Media Field still needs to tie into the Media Mover module, firstly, to even allow uploading (harvesting) videos and sending them to YouTube (processing) before storing them in the content field. Once it does that, though, we can get a little smarter. Perhaps allowing users to post responses through the API, which would become YouTube videos showing up in response to a video there, and automatically also becoming a response to the Drupal content.

We can also tap into the custom queries when selecting video to embed.

Finally, we should be able to have more control over the UI, and could use jQuery to control the playback of the video, perhaps autoplaying a few seconds after the page load, or maybe jumping forward to our favorite part of the video. We'll have to see about that.

What does that mean for the Internet? As pointed out by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, Google's just flexing their muscles a bit more, trying to ensure the bulk of video on the Internet goes through GooTube. At least Embedded Media Field is taking a more open approach, independently supporting many other providers, such as Blip.TV, Revver, and Brightcove.

Aaron