Book Image

Drupal 7 Media - Third Edition

By : Liran Tal
Book Image

Drupal 7 Media - Third Edition

By: Liran Tal

Overview of this book

Integrating images, video, and audio content on a Drupal site requires knowledge of appropriate community modules, and an understanding of how to configure and connect them properly. With the power of up-to-date technologies such as HTML5, responsive web design, and the best modules available in Drupal's eco-system, we can create the best Drupal 7 media website. Drupal 7 Media is a practical, hands-on guide that will introduce you to the basic structure of a Drupal site and guide you through the integration of images, videos, and audio content. Learn to leverage the most suitable community modules and up-to-date technology such as HTML5 to offer a great user experience through rich media content. The book begins with a practical introduction to the basic Drupal building blocks. It then breaks down each media resource, and explores them in detail. You will learn how to leverage Drupal's community modules to implement support for images, videos, and audio content, along with the best practices for implementation. We will be mentioning ideas throughout the book, which you can extend upon and use to build your own web applications. We will explore HTML5 support for media resources, the semantic web, and responsive web design, which are key topics in modern web application development. We will then build upon this knowledge and add more functionality to our sample website, such as support for analytic charts and customizing images, all of which we will implement using our own custom modules. You will learn everything you need to know about building, extending, and configuring a Drupal 7 media web application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Adding videos hosted locally


Having good integration facilities with third-party sites around your niche content, and sharing capabilities are pretty basic features you will find in most apps today. You may still want or even need to provide your users with the ability to upload their media content to your site directly.

Uploading video files to your site means that the media is right there in your website to play, but how will you play it? Pre-HTML5 era browsers had to rely on third-party plugins such as QuickTime to play Apple's MOV format, or Adobe's Shockwave Flash format to play the popular SWF format. Due to the fact that movies are naturally not encoded in any of these formats but rather using popular codecs such as DIVX, XVID, MPEG2, or MPEG4, it required to transcode videos from their original format to SWF to be playable over the web, which then introduced demand for more resources (transcoding is a CPU-intensive task).

If all that sounds a bit scary and complex, do not worry, because...