Question about loading access MP4s

[Mike Demers]

We're using drush to straight load MP4s deferring derivative creation (we have that managed by gearman). Since it's now optional, the creation of an OBJ datastream is bypassed leaving us with just an MP4 datastream. Since there is now an option to send the OBJ datastream to the player my question is: How do we drush load our MP4s as the OBJ datastream? Without the existence of the OBJ datastream thumbnail derivatives are not created. I guess having the ability to create derivatives from the MP4 datastream would solve our problem too.

Anyone with a similar workflow run into this problem?
-Mike

[Rosemary Le Faive]

Video solution pack, I gather?

It sounds like you want to move existing MP4 datastreams to OBJ and trigger thumbnail generation, but not MP4 generation? 

There's not a clean process for renaming existing datastreams (essentially it can't be done; you have to copy and delete). Though it's bandwidth-intensive, you could  download the MP4 then re-upload them as OBJ. You could check out Mark Jordan's datastream CRUD tools that could help [1] (disclaimer: i haven't used them yet). Or if you wanted to write your own drush script, it might be possible to use Tuque to set the content of an OBJ datastream from the ->content() of the MP4 datastream? (speculation, i'm not sure how big your files are or if this is an issue)

But before you do this, the following settings should help you to have thumbnails created:

- check the Islandora general configuration page to make sure you're not globally deferring derivatives.

- check the video solution pack config page to see that you are NOT creating MP4 locally but that you ARE creating the thumbnail locally.

Or... maybe you could write a drush script to create thumbnails from MP4? That's a little rebellious, and in the future if you add more objects with only the MP4 datastream they wouldn't automatically get thumbnails.

Good luck!

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/islandora/q1udVKoh194/12SFxMw0KAAJ

[Mike Demers]

Thanks Rosemary. Yes, the video solution pack. We haven't loaded many videos yet so I'd actually like to load the files as OBJ datastreams as opposed to MP4 datastreams. As you speculated, the videos are generally too big for us to want to do any post-ingest fiddling that would involve re-creating, re-loading, or moving the file.

Since we're fortunate enough not to have had loaded many videos yet I was able to find a preprocessing solution. I took the TN generating command out of derivatives.inc and pieced it together with a shell script to run against my video batches before ingesting. Works well enough so far.

https://github.com/mdemers/jimmies/blob/master/create-thumbnails.bash

-Mike