What?

This plugin allows a Movable Type blog to give the readers the chance to comments via video. The video is uploaded and encoded into flash video (like on youTube) and then displayed in the comments of an article with the use of an open source flash video player.

Requirements

This plugin isn’t as straight forward and many others. The reason is, you need to have FFMPEG installed on your websever in order to encode the video correctly. However, installing FFMPEG is only the beginning, because you can / should also compile FFMPEG with any number of extras in order to handle the myriad of different video types out there.

The Plugin File: videoComment.pl (Update: Dreamhost made some change with their servers, so I had to remove the .pl extension. Download the file at the updated link and add the .pl extension yourself. Sorry.)
FFMPEG: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
Flash Video Player: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash+Video+Player

Features

This first release features:

• Upload and auto-encoding to a directory of your choice.
• Zero code changes to any Movable Type scripts, just modify the comment form on your template.
• Zero additions to the Movable Type database.
• When a comment is deleted in the Movable Type interface, its associated video content and screenshot is removed automatically.

Demo

As of right now, no demo is available at Hell Yeah Bitch! .com. I will post on tonight, after Dreamhost fixes their network connectivity issues. (No use in demoing a video upload, with the speeds are this slow.)
Update: Dreamhost seems to have gotten us to move at least a little faster. You can now see a demo in the comments form of every post, but please use this article’s comments for discussion and testing.

Install

1. Check to see if your web server or web host has FFMPEG installed and configured. If not, you will need to do this yourself or request that your system administrator install it for you. For help configuring and installing FFMPEG with all the video decoding ability your site needs, see http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ and http://hellyeahbitch.com/archives/2006/09/081009
2. Download the Flash Video Player, and “install” by putting the flash player file in the root of your web directory.
3. Now, download the plugin file, and place it in your $MT_DIRECTORY/plugins directory
4. Modify the plugin file at the top to set the directories that you want your video comments to reside and where the plugin should place the temporary files before they are deleted.
5. Modify the HTML form in your comments template to accommodate the uploading of the video file. To do this, modify your form to this general example:
   

   [Your current form's contents]
   Video:
   < input tabindex="6" name="video" type="file" / >
   [Submit button]
   

6. Lastly, the plugin will give you two new tags for use in your comments templates. They are for use in between your tags. They are: < MTIfVideo >, <$MTShowVideo$>. The first is used to check to see if the comment being displayed has video content with it, the second is used to show said content. So in your comments showing area of your template, you would put something like
   

   < MTIfVideo >
   <$MTShowVideo$>
   < /MTIfVideo >

   After the rest of your comment tags.

7. Your done.

Like I said, its not as straight forward as most plugins are, but with a little work on the FFMPEG install, you can get your video comments working just fine.

Hopes and Dreams

- Hopefully Dreamhost will fix the problem tonight and I can post up a demo.
- Hopefully I will figure out how to install faad2 on my Dreamhost shared server account so that you can upload video with AAC encoded audio for use with the comment system.
- Hopefully I’ll get at least enough response and bug reports to tap out a new version sometime soon and possibly figure out a way to kill a few steps in the install process.