Integrating Drupal with the Kaltura platform

There are a variety of ways to integrate video into a Drupal site. There are free but branded options like YouTube or Blip.tv, self-hosted options using the FlashVideo module, and higher-end video platforms like Viddler and Kaltura. We wrote an article comparing the pros and cons of these: Video Hosting and Integration in Drupal.

In this post I want to talk specifically about integrating a Drupal site with Kaltura. We recently worked on integrating the Kaltura platform with a large, complex Drupal project called the Annenberg Social News Platform. The site was recently featured as a Drupal.org case study.

What is Kaltura?

Kaltura is really two things:

1. Kaltura.com: A professional enterprise-level video hosting provider, complete with custom analytics data
2. Kaltura.org: An open-source video hosting server software sponsor

Essentially the platform that Kaltura uses to host video for their customers is also available to the public to download and run on their own hardware, should a user want to roll their own video hosting server. When choosing to proceed with Kaltura you really have two options: do you want Kaltura to take care of the hosting, bandwidth, storage and backup of video, or do you want to handle this yourself and host your own platform?

The Kaltura dashboard for managing your videos

This decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you feel your organization’s IT department has both the technical expertise and resources to support the platform and you feel that you can host the video more cheaply than Kaltura can, then you should host it yourself. Otherwise, a hosted option is likely better.

Kaltura also provides libraries to ease integration with common platforms, like Moodle, Joomla, Elgg, most common programming libraries and of course Drupal.

Drupal integration

The Kaltura module comes with many customization settings

Integrating Kaltura with Drupal is straight-forward thanks to the Kaltura Drupal module. You install the module and enter in a password provided by Kaltura so that the module can communicate with your account. The module comes with a slick Flash-based uploader for importing any local content, capturing video from web cams or grabbing content from other sites like Flickr.

The module automatically adds the Kaltura uploader to the content creation screen for the content types of your choosing. While the user stays inside of Drupal, the content is actually uploaded (and eventually transcoded) to Kaltura servers. The reference to the Kaltura video actually becomes a new node in your site associated to the node the user is creating. Again, this is invisible to the user.

When the video is displayed the Kaltura module outputs embed code that pulls the Flash player directly from Kaltura, and embeds your content. If the content hasn’t finished transcoding on the Kaltura end, the player will appear but will show a message that the transcoding isn’t complete.

In addition, the user can’t select the thumbnail image that will appear by default in the player when the page loads but before the player has started playing.

The flash-based uploader provided by Kaltura

One feature the module doesn’t provide that we ended up needing to create for the project was the ability for a user to select where in the body field the video player should appear. You can customize a set position for the player to appear in the Drupal theme, but there isn’t an out-the-box solution to allow the content creator to customize this position. We extended the excellent Video Filter module to achieve this.

Wrapping up

Overall, Kaltura integrates well with Drupal and provides a robust and powerful video hosting platform for Drupal-powered sites.