PHPmotion Video CMS

Evaluating other Content Management Systems helps us keep our Drupal-based sites relevant. In this post, I review a CMS focused soley on you-tube like video sites.

Update: This article was originally mislabeled as "open source". PHPmotion is not open source.

PHPMotion is a "media sharing" content management system allowing you to create and host your own video sharing site. Having more experience with expensive and customized media asset management systems I decided to try this free / low cost system out. Aspects of the system important to me were quality, configuration, performance and customization.

Quality

Video served up through the system is all progressive download. For a low-medium traffic site this can be sufficient for youtube-like video. I believe with additional customization the system can be configured to deliver an actual video stream.

Configuration

The system is fairly configurable, but some variables used for converting uploaded videos can be difficult or impossible to change using the site administration tool. For example, I found a bug that caused FFMpeg (one of the tools used to convert uploaded videos) to re-encode all videos even though it appeared to be disabled. It required making changes to settings.php and changing a the stored value to "no". Also, videos converted with Mencoder (namely, H.264 videos) are all converted to a hard-coded resolution. You will have to change values in multiple source files to change this resolution.

I wanted to save time and elected to use a new web host instead of install and configure the system on a dedicated server. Installation looks as though it can be a little time consuming and complex-- a number of users on the forums were having issues with PHPshield which is a component used to encrypt part of the PHPmotion code. All HTML output to the site goes through this encrypted code and forces a footer to all pages of the site telling users the site is powered by PHPmotion. This footer can only legally be removed by purchasing a copy of the CMS for around $100.

Performance

My experience with the system so far is that it shows my sample movie trailers with only a few jitters that seem to smooth-out after a second or two. I think part of this might be system performance or browser related instead of bit latency and bandwidth. MP3 audio worked without issue.

Customization

The CMS uses themes / templates (they seem to mix the use of the words together in different places) that are take some exploration and research to customize. The naming conventions used in parts of the code / file names and duplication of code adds some difficulty and time to the process, but it doesn't increase the learning curve too much.

One important note is by default the system is configured to convert uploaded videos to 4:3 and all thumbnails are created and displayed on the site in 4:3. This is pretty annoying, as one forum user pointed out, since most video today is 16:9. It required changing code in many places, but I was able to convert everything to a 16:9 ratio on the Commercial Progression TV site theme.

Another important point is the stretching of video-- I hate distorted aspect ratios and by default the player is told to use the "exactfit" method of stretching. This causes even 16:9 video to be displayed wrong if you're viewing on a 16:10 monitor (like my widescreen samsung). I'd recommend changing to the "uniform" method for a stage that is as large as possible without an incorrect aspect ratio.

Conclusion

Having only used the system for a couple days I was able to get a new site up and running, customized, and serving content. Quality is decent and very viewable. Theme creation and customization is very limited.