Earlier this month, I spoke at the Dallas Drupal Camp about Drupal and mobile video. I’ve worked on a couple of projects for clients this year and last year that involved uploading and displaying videos from a mobile app on iOS and Android. Some of them have used Drupal for the server, others haven’t used Drupal at all. Mobile video can only be done through a native app (or PhoneGap), as HTML5 hasn’t provided support for uploading video through input types yet.

One of the obstacles to using Drupal as a video platform is getting everything set up – even though there are plenty of video modules, it can be tough to set up the Video module with Zencoder as a transcoding solution and Amazon S3 for storage and content distribution. Making this a lot easier if you are either starting from scratch or building out a proof of concept/minimum viable product is Octopus Video (http://octopusvideo.org/), a Drupal 7 distribution developed by Heidi Software and Symphony Themes. In effect, it’s a private YouTube distribution, which you can then extend using normal Drupal 7 modules and views to become a corporate training video archive, the back-end for a consumer-facing mobile app for cat videos, or whatever you want.

I gave a lightning talk about Octopus Video to the Austin Drupal User’s Group, and everyone there seemed pretty enthusiastic about the topic, so I decided to take it a step further and give a talk on it at the Dallas Drupal Camp this year.

In addition to sharing a lot of tips and tricks I learned from using Octopus Video as the server for a video-based mobile app prototype, I also created an open source iPhone app (Apache-style license) to show off some of the things you can easily do – upload video, display a list of videos from a Drupal video, and then play back videos stored on Amazon S3.

The GitHub repository for the open source iPhone app is here:

https://github.com/jefflinwood/DrupalMobileVideoAppIOS

This was a quick demonstration project for the Dallas Drupal camp, not extracted from a commercial project, so it’s missing a lot of the extras that would make it a polished app. I’ve added a few of them as issues to the GitHub project, and if I can find some more free time, I’d like to keep moving forward with it.