MediaGoblin 0.2.0: Our Tubes

MediaGoblin 0.2.0: Our Tubes banner

Welcome to Our Tubes! The 0.2.0 release enables you to turn on video and run your own HTML5 video hosting site! Whose tubes? Our Tubes!

Sintel trailer!

Below is an example video that's been transcoded and uploaded using MediaGoblin. The magic comes from GStreamer!


Sintel, by the Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.

Our video hosting is html5 standards compliant! That means you need a standards-compliant browser like a recent Firefox or Chromium to see video. (If you aren't seeing anything, go upgrade your browser.) Video is resource intensive and requires extra dependencies like GStreamer so it's disabled by default. If you want to run a video hosting site for your friends and family, now you can! To enable video hosting on your site, check out these docs.

MediaGoblin's big picture goal is to support loads of different media types, so video is just the beginning. In the near future MediaGoblin will be able host slide sharing, three dimensional model uploading and viewing, even ASCII art. You can already check out this experimental branch and showcase your rad ASCII art.

What else? This month we fixed it so that when you resize an uploaded image, it retains the same file format. PNG images are still PNG images and GIFs are still GIFs. This is particularly good news for fans of semi-transparent PNGs. There were also some small styling improvements this month, including better navigation. Take a look:

Cat and Spider drawing, with transparent background

With our MediaGoblin instance hosters in mind, we made it a little easier to customize stuff and we also improved the documentation for larger volume instances, especially video hosters.

Thank you to everyone who helped with Our Tubes! We had some new folks join the project this month (Yay!!) and there was lots of great work and support from our returning contributors. We're especially grateful to the people who stepped up to review each other's code this month. Best. Team. EVER. Seriously! Give a round of applause to: Aaron Williamson, Christopher Allan Webber, Corey Farwell, Deborah Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jakob Kramer, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Larisa Hoffenbecker, Manuel Urbano Santos, Nathan Yergler, Pablo J. Urbano Santos, Sam Kleinman, Will Kahn-Greene, Pierre Geoffroy, Harry Chen, George Pop, Aleksej Serdjukov, osc (transifex.net), and martin (transifex.net). Thanks folks... we couldn't have done it without you. (PS: It's possible we missed you; if so let us know and we'll correct this post.)

What next? More media types! And we've got a roadmap for federation now. Look out uncharted territory of decentralized web, we're coming! In fact, enough new stuff is on the horizon at MediaGoblin to warrant its own whole post. Be sure to check back in with us soon. Or if you like spoilers, come see us in IRC (#mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net) and see who you can shake down for hints of what's coming next. Better yet, infiltrate us and find out from the inside. There's a ton to do and we would love your help!