 | Level: Intermediate Duane O'Brien (d@duaneobrien.com), PHP developer, Freelance
Katie Horn (K4@engineering.phenomenauts.com), Developer, Freelance
Will Robot (willrobot@gmail.com), PHP Developer, Freelance Writer
02 Sep 2008 Setting up your own on-demand video site doesn't have to be complicated.
Upload some videos and put them up for people to watch — easy
enough. But if you're going to be doing a lot of videos, you'll need a way to
keep them organized. This three-part "Setting
up your own on-demand video site with PHP" series takes you through everything
you need to know to create video optimized for the Web, as well as creating a
PHP application that will help keep your videos organized and accessible. Part 1 lays the groundwork by assembling and installing the necessary components and
gathering and converting the video. Part 2 builds the basic application. And here
in Part 3, you add create a slick user interface and integrate the example with YouTube.
In this tutorial
This series was written with the developer in mind. You should be comfortable working
with PHP and Web applications. You don't need to be an expert to go through this
series, but not a lot of time will be spent explaining PHP syntax and Web application
concepts. If you're unfamiliar with either, but keen to learn, feel free to dive right
in. It wouldn't hurt to have some basic understanding of digital video, but we'll
explain most of what you need to know. You did a lot of coding in Part 2, and you'll do even more here. We have some video
tagging to do, then we're going to start using the recently opened-up YouTube APIs to
push out your videos and pull back some statistics. It's going to be a lot of fun,
but it's going to take a lot of work, too. If you haven't completed Part 1 and Part 2 yet, you will probably be completely lost. Go back and run through those now.
Prerequisites
If you don't know anything about writing code, PHP, databases, etc., you will find this
series challenging. You should get up to speed on writing Web applications in
PHP first.
System requirements
To work with digital video in this series, you'll need to set up a few things; the
installation of basic components won't be covered here:
- Some digital video content — It can be video you've found, shot, or imported from another medium.
- A Microsoft® Windows® XP box — The examples provided use some
software written for Windows XP. However, if you're adept at editing and converting
video on computers running other operating systems, you certainly may do so.
- FFmpeg — An open source command-line video-conversion utility.
- Riva FLV Encoder V2.0 for Windows — A video-conversion utility for Windows that is
no-cost for the first 30 days of use.
- Wikipedia for .flv conversion programs for other platforms.
- Red5 — A Java™-based open source Flash server.
- JW FLV Media Player V3.15 — A small embeddable Flash media player.
For the Web application, you'll also need the following:
- An HTTP server that supports sessions (and preferably
mod_rewrite). This series was
written using Apache V1.3 with mod_rewrite enabled.
- The 1.2 beta version of CakePHP.
- PHP V5.1.4 or greater — Not all the frameworks being examined require
this release level of PHP, but for the sake of ease, all frameworks will use the same
PHP installation. This series was written using PHP V5.2.3.
- A reasonably recent version of MySQL — Several other database options
are available and supported, but both this series and the sample application were
written using MySQL V5.0.37.
- The new YouTube APIs and Tools for integrating with your application.
- A developer key and client ID from YouTube through Google's YouTube APIs and Tools dashboard
Formats html, pdf
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