"Plumi is a Free Software video sharing Content Management System based on Plone and produced by EngageMedia in collaboration with Unweb.me.
Plumi enables you to create your own sophisticated video sharing site. It includes a sophisticated workflow, site-wide, vodcasting, server-side flash/ogg transcoding and embedding, large file uploading via FTP and a range of other useful features." (from official about).
Setup
You are thinking that its setup can be really complex and that would require a lot of work... it is indeed! BUT someone has already done the dirty work for you!
It's really simple. Just follow the instruction from the official buildout and you'll come up with a ready-to-go instance. WARNING: the official manual is not always up to date so check packages's README.
If on one side the buildout is complete, from the sys admin point of view is not that modular (nginx, varnish, etc all in one). For a custom setup probably you'll end up writing your own buildout.
Sys admin note
A patched version of nginx is used (see build.cfg). I asked on the official mailing list and they answered me that in Plumi 4.5 the use the http module of nginx, that is a must-have for a reliable http upload of huge files (see original thread).
The buildout sets up a ZEO cluster environment to delegate video transcoding to the 'worker' client via plone.app.async. A scheduler is in charge of transcoding operations trough collective.transcode.star.
Usually in Abstract we use RelStorage and we were interested in knowing if they ever used such storage. The answer is: "we haven't tested Plumi + RelStorage but I expect it to work without issues." (see original message).
UPDATE: actually we have a working setup using RelStorage with a more modular approach (still a work-in-progress though).
Features
Beside classic Plone features you will be able to upload videos in different formats, share multimedia contents among users, discover people with your same interests, etc. All you need to creare a video community.
For a complete list of feature, please, refer to the official page.
One of the most important feature is the FTP upload. FTP is set up by the buildout itself so you do not need to worry about that. FTP usage is document here.
Another useful feature is 'download as torrent' for sure.
Screenshots
Your brand new Plumi has a simplified design to facilitate your work: publish video and contents. Top right you find two meaningful menu: browse and publish. The first one to navigate trough contents, the second one for publishing contents:
Publishing a video is really simple. In 'publish' menu click on 'video' and the following view will be presented (dived in two pieces for easier display):
that allow us to insert main data: title, description, publication year, language, text, a thumbnail image and the license (licenses are managed via collective.contentlicensing).
Using 'Categorise' tab e can add all the metadata we need for improving our classification, like genre, country, topic, tags and so on:
Once published the video will be available from the homepage:
and this is what you see in the video's page:
Text is hidden, so you must click on 'Show more' to display it.
As you can notice, the transcoding status is showed at the bottom of the page. You can also restart the transcoding project if needed.
Conclusions
This software is a valid solution for whoever need to integrate document management and advanced content publish facilities with video sharing.
It's a real example on how you can use Plone's power and flexibility to build a platform that is not only a bare CMS.
In our opinion it should be one of the jewels of the Plone eco-system. Sadly, is not advertised enough.
Last, I remember you that is possible to try out a real deploy of Plumi by visiting www.engagemedia.org or trough official demo. How to get involved and get information