MediaGoblin 0.8.0 "A Gallery of Fine Creatures" Released

paroneayea writes: GNU MediaGoblin has released version 0.8.0 dubbed "A Gallery of Fine Creatures". This release includes a number of improvements including an upgrade to GStreamer 1.0, improved video thumbnailing, and preliminary Python 3 support. Additionally, an improved Social API support making use of the Pump API means that existing pump.io clients like Pumpa and Dianara are now compatible with MediaGoblin. This coincides with work underway by MediaGoblin developers working with the W3C Social Working Group to build a general federation standard, of which a draft submission to the group is already in progress.

Comments

What is MediaGoblin?

[Anonymous Coward]

MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.

Because I don't know what every project actually is and why drive unneeded traffic to their page

Re:What is MediaGoblin?

[slaker]

It's a hosting framework for media., so if you want to throw some videos or photos online and for some reason you don't like Youtube/Flickr/Tumblr/Zombo AND you have the disk space, CPU cycles and bandwidth, you can put up a MediaGoblin site and manage everything yourself.

It's a thing that should probably exist, but it's hard for me to get excited about it, either.

I more or less posted this exact same comment the last time we had a thread about Mediagoblin.

Re:What is MediaGoblin?

[Culture20]

It's a gallery of fine creatures, obviously.

Re:What is MediaGoblin?

[CronoCloud]

So it's only useful for those guys who have a sysadmin job, who have a server rack of their own in their basement and a business grade internet connection who want to host their cat pictures and videos on their own machine?

Re:What is MediaGoblin?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

It seems (still) potentially very useful, and the federation stuff seems like a bigger deal that it might initially sound like (instead of needing one person or organization to provide a huge server and mirrors for a big collection of media and user accounts, smaller groups and individuals can "federate" more manageably-sized small server instances that they each run). Also, native pump.io (which is more or less a very extensible "microblogging" standard if I understand right) support ought to mean you won't need a special "mediagoblin" client to use it outside of the web interface, you'll be able to use whatever general pump.io client software you might already be using on other services at the same time (again, assuming I understood that right).

It's one backend that handles a whole lot of different kinds of "media", so you don't need to install a "photo gallery" and a "video server" and a "document server" and so on separately. It takes whatever supported variety of media you give it and converts it to a "web-friendly" open format as needed. As their wiki currently shows: "In the future, there will be all sorts of media types you can enable, but in the meanwhile there are six additional media types: video, audio, raw image, ascii art, STL/3d models, PDF and Document." (Last I heard, it additionally supports a "blog post" sort of type i.e. HTML text. If MediaGoblin takes off I suspect someone would get around to adding .epub as a supported type as well.)

I'd probably be more familiar with it except of the two media types I could potentially get a lot of use out of it for myself, photos/still images seem to be very well supported but I've already got a much-easier-to-install piwigo instance running for those, and audio support is kind of a kludgy mess at the moment. MediaGoblin would otherwise likely be a great (nigh-ideal, even) system for building a sound-effects library and/or podcast-hosting.

To support audio, you have to install scipy and one or two other modules as I recall (in addition to the rest of the python stuff MediaGoblin needs), though it has nothing to do with the actual audio - from what I remember of what I could glean from trying to poke around in the source (disclaimer, I am NOT very experienced at all at python or even "object-oriented" programming in general) every bit of uploaded audio is currently transcoded twice - once to ogg vorbis, which is only used to generate the still-image "thumbnail" graphic in the form of a spectrogram (that's what scipy et al is for) rather than e.g. extracting "cover art" from the metadata or generating a simple image via gd or something. Then that's discarded and the audio is re-transcoded to "webm audio" rather than .ogg or .opus. As far as I know (see previous disclaimer...) there's no ability to read "tags" from pre-existing metadata, either.

I wish I had a better grasp of python - I know gstreamer has (undocumented?) support for reading and writing media metadata tags, if I knew what I was doing I'd try to come up with some patches for the audio thumbnail/tags support, but since I can't even figure out where one would go in the sourcecode to change the output format (to .opus or .ogg) I suspect the amount of guidance I'd need from the people that know what they're doing would make me more of an irritant than a help...

Re:Umm

[TechyImmigrant]

Dafuq does the summary actually say?

I think it's a transcript of a D&D game.

Media What?

[westlake]

I feel as if I have dug three levels down into the MediaGoblin site and still without a clue as to what this thing is all about.

Re:Media What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel as if I have dug three levels down into the MediaGoblin site and still without a clue as to what this thing is all about.

From the very top of the page at the first link:

"MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc."

Basically, it's a framework that you can throw up on a server and easily distribute pictures/video/audio.

Re:Media What?

[FilmedInNoir]

Ok, so I want to build my own Vimeo or Spotify I could use this to handle the media delivery portion (e,g, showing a video to a user) while I focus on the shopping cart/authentication methods/getting paid.

Re:Media What?

[squiggleslash]

Look it's quite simple, it's a multiplatform framework to empower SAAS professionals to partner with their clients on provisioning media services over the cloud through standardized, open, technologies.

Powered by GStreamer.

(The sad thing is the above MBAspeak is 100% accurate.)

Re:Media What?

[tehcyder]

I got a security blocking message trying to download it at work, which is not encouraging. Is it chock full of dodgy flash adverts or something?

Easier than having editors

[Overzeetop]

Timothy is actually just a bot.

Re:Umm

[Minwee]

Dafuq does the summary actually say?

I think it's a transcript of a D&D game.

Then where are the Cheetos?

Clear as mud, that

[wonkey_monkey]

GNU MediaGoblin has released version 0.8.0 dubbed "A Gallery of Fine Creatures".

Of course. Heaven forbid anyone should be able to glean even the faintest of hint of what it does from the name or version codename.

Thanks to slaker for doing what the editors apparently could not (be arsed to do).

Re:Umm

[TechyImmigrant]

Dafuq does the summary actually say?

I think it's a transcript of a D&D game.

Then where are the Cheetos?

Cheetos2.0 has been superseded.

Re:Why So Negative?

[TechyImmigrant]

All I see are Debbie Downers posting...
Can someone at least be happy for the mediagoblin people?

I think it's pretty awesome.

After reading 30 comments and finally getting an idea of what it is, yes it seems nice. I am happy for them an appreciate their work. I could host videos on our (very small) company website and they might not behave horribly. This is something I would do to bypass youtube for instructional videos.

I still don't get what's decentralized though. What does that mean?

Re:Umm

[BenJeremy]

I'm glad I'm not the only person do wonder about that.

Does it hook up to GooglyMoogly and the Black Bart Inference Engine? Can it plug-and-play with ZeekZek? What about compatibility with older ZanyBunch scripts?

Eh? What? Huh?

[CitizenJohnJohn]

I only came here to snark about the incomprehensible summary, but I see everyone else has beaten me to it.

Re:Umm

[cptnapalm]

A gazebo? ...

What's it doing?