docs/source/siteadmin/media-types.rst

   1 .. MediaGoblin Documentation
   2
   3    Written in 2011, 2012 by MediaGoblin contributors
   4
   5    To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all
   6    copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to
   7    the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without
   8    any warranty.
   9
  10    You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain
  11    Dedication along with this software. If not, see
  12    <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>.
  13
  14 .. _media-types-chapter:
  15
  16 ====================
  17 Media Types
  18 ====================
  19
  20 In the future, there will be all sorts of media types you can enable,
  21 but in the meanwhile there are three additional media types: video, audio
  22 and ascii art.
  23
  24 First, you should probably read ":doc:`configuration`" to make sure
  25 you know how to modify the mediagoblin config file.
  26
  27
  28 Enabling Media Types
  29 ====================
  30
  31 Media types are enabled in your mediagoblin configuration file, typically it is
  32 created by copying ``mediagoblin.ini`` to ``mediagoblin_local.ini`` and then
  33 applying your changes to ``mediagoblin_local.ini``. If you don't already have a
  34 ``mediagoblin_local.ini``, create one in the way described.
  35
  36 Most media types have additional dependencies that you will have to install.
  37 You will find descriptions on how to satisfy the requirements of each media type
  38 on this page.
  39
  40 To enable a media type, edit the ``media_types`` list in your
  41 ``mediagoblin_local.ini``. For example, if your system supported image and
  42 video media types, then the list would look like this::
  43
  44     media_types = mediagoblin.media_types.image, mediagoblin.media_types.video
  45
  46 How does MediaGoblin decide which media type to use for a file?
  47 ===============================================================
  48
  49 MediaGoblin has two methods for finding the right media type for an uploaded
  50 file. One is based on the file extension of the uploaded file; every media type
  51 maintains a list of supported file extensions. The second is based on a sniffing
  52 handler, where every media type may inspect the uploaded file and tell if it
  53 will accept it.
  54
  55 The file-extension-based approach is used before the sniffing-based approach,
  56 if the file-extension-based approach finds a match, the sniffing-based approach
  57 will be skipped as it uses far more processing power.
  58
  59
  60 Video
  61 =====
  62
  63 To enable video, first install gstreamer and the python-gstreamer
  64 bindings (as well as whatever gstremaer extensions you want,
  65 good/bad/ugly).  On Debianoid systems::
  66
  67     sudo apt-get install python-gst0.10 gstreamer0.10-plugins-{base,bad,good,ugly} \
  68         gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
  69
  70
  71 Now you should be able to submit videos, and mediagoblin should
  72 transcode them.
  73
  74 .. note::
  75
  76    You almost certainly want to separate Celery from the normal
  77    paste process or your users will probably find that their connections
  78    time out as the video transcodes.  To set that up, check out the
  79    ":doc:`production-deployments`" section of this manual.
  80
  81
  82 Audio
  83 =====
  84
  85 To enable audio, install the gstreamer and python-gstreamer bindings (as well
  86 as whatever gstreamer plugins you want, good/bad/ugly), scipy and numpy are
  87 also needed for the audio spectrograms.
  88 To install these on Debianoid systems, run::
  89
  90     sudo apt-get install python-gst0.10 gstreamer0.10-plugins-{base,bad,good,ugly} \
  91         gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg python-numpy python-scipy
  92
  93 The ``scikits.audiolab`` package you will install in the next step depends on the
  94 ``libsndfile1-dev`` package, so we should install it.
  95 On Debianoid systems, run::
  96
  97     sudo apt-get install libsndfile1-dev
  98
  99 .. note::
 100     scikits.audiolab will display a warning every time it's imported if you do
 101     not compile it with alsa support. Alsa support is not necessary for the GNU
 102     MediaGoblin application but if you do not wish the alsa warnings from
 103     audiolab you should also install ``libasound2-dev`` before installing
 104     scikits.audiolab.
 105
 106 Then install ``scikits.audiolab`` for the spectrograms::
 107
 108     ./bin/pip install scikits.audiolab
 109
 110 Add ``mediagoblin.media_types.audio`` to the ``media_types`` list in your
 111 ``mediagoblin_local.ini`` and restart MediaGoblin. You should now be able to
 112 upload and listen to audio files!
 113
 114
 115 Ascii art
 116 =========
 117
 118 To enable ascii art support, first install the
 119 `chardet <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/chardet>`_
 120 library, which is necessary for creating thumbnails of ascii art::
 121
 122     ./bin/easy_install chardet
 123
 124
 125 Next, modify (and possibly copy over from ``mediagoblin.ini``) your
 126 ``mediagoblin_local.ini``.  In the ``[mediagoblin]`` section, add
 127 ``mediagoblin.media_types.ascii`` to the ``media_types`` list.
 128
 129 For example, if your system supported image and ascii art media types, then
 130 the list would look like this::
 131
 132     media_types = mediagoblin.media_types.image, mediagoblin.media_types.ascii
 133
 134 Now any .txt file you uploaded will be processed as ascii art!