I don't see any video settings in the admin in 2.0. It only shows image settings. I triple checked it was in fact 2.0 and not the older version.
Also is there a way to just allow image uploads and not video/audio?
Since out last release, both BuddyPress and Kaltura have changed drastically, so we made the plugin from the scratch, but this time we didn’t added many options in the dashboard since BuddyPress sites are focused more on the front-end of the site. Though each media is attached to the WordPress’ default Media Library so we simply reused what was already present in WordPress.
This edition does not rely on Kaltura at all, and all the files are saved in WordPress by default. Though provision of other hosting services like Kaltura, YouTube, VideoPress, etc are in our roadmap, which we’ll be developing as extensions of this plugin.
is there a way to just allow image uploads and not video/audio?
No, its either on for all media or off for all.
I think you should make video/audio optional or better yet assigned by user role. Every sites needs are different, but I don’t really see any site wanting to open up video uploads to the public. Perhaps private or membership sites, but I think there is a much larger market for photo uploads. For rich media I think a much better option would be embeds such as YouTube, Vimeo etc. and not do uploading at all. That would give site members complete control over their videos and site owners would not have to deal with upload, storage and playback issues.
separate role permissions for photo/video would make a beneficial extension someday. Even being on a small scale, I am already hosting 18TB of video and climbing. I’d hate to open ‘free’ video storage to the masses as I couldn’t handle the bill I’d receive.
Right now, I simply provision a kaltura parner id for my paying clients and allow them to use video. Having the separation with buddypress would be a nice benefit.
It also opens up a ton of security issues. Even with roles I would be concerned with bots being able to bypass them like they can with Private Groups using BP. We could withstand a flood of spam images but videos is another story.
Added to the frustration is the fact older versions of this plugin are no longer supported so everyone has to choose between removing a feature their members enjoyed using or opening your site up to complete and sure destruction. This is a critical error in planning.
@mcguffin: We’ll be adding the option of enabling video, audio or images from the options directly, so that users can only upload the media types selected by the admin of the site. Also about privacy, BuddyPress 1.6 has enabled some privacy features in their plugin, and we’ll be making sure they don’t go unused in our plugin.
@shawn: Thanks for explaining your scenario, we’ll think about the roles thing you mentioned.
@both: Don’t worry about hosting the videos, this is just a minimalistic release, we’re about to add support for Kaltura, Youtube, Vimeo, and other hosting supports and even CDN based delivery system. Hope it might resolve your issues 
When you mention Youtube, Vimeo,etc are you talking about uploading video to those sites or embedding it?
Something else you may want to consider along with file size limits is it should have a 24 hours (etc) file size limits so they can’t flood your site. If you really want to get fancy you could add a way to monetize higher upload limits so sites could charge members wanting that extra space. If you really, really want to get fancy you could look at incorporating Google Drive to allow for community file editing, but user roles would be great for now.
When I mentioned support for those hostings, I meant uploading directly to those servers instead of the website hosting space though the uploads will be directly from your site itself.
About the file size limits, there are not limits as far as we’ve implemented, though the limit you see on the upload page comes from the Minimum of the Max upload size and Max post size of your sever. About incorporating such limits, I’ll surely consider but I can’t promise anything right now, whether it will be there or not but sure I’ll let you know about it though.
I think uploading to those sites is a big mistake. There is little value in having them use your site as a middleman. Why have all those extras support issues when they can upload it directly to YouTube etc. That puts you in the position of having to deal with anything that goes wrong on your site AND any YouTube issues. It also means users will have to upload their older videos twice. That makes no sense. It makes much more sense (and a ton less coding) to just allow them to embed via a link.
I know you have been working on this plugin for a long time, but I think much of it is like hunting butterflies with a tank. Video hosting is a very complicated business on many, many levels (coding, security, legal, etc.). Keeping it simple will not only make it much more popular it will also be much easier for you to update and improve.
Different BuddyPress users have different requirements, for example, Shawn here is already running a Kaltura Server, so he does not want to use his wordpress server for hosting videos, so in his case the Kaltura hosting solution can be useful for him. Though in your case you need user management, you want to control what user can do by what he pays. Your model is different from most BuddyPress’ owner’s model. Though we might be happy to help with your case as well and might put it in our todo list.
I don’t want to speak for Shawn, but I believe from what he wrote he is using Kaltura for his own videos and not site members. Kaltura already has plugins for site owners. Of course this is mute anyway because you don’t currently offer Kaltura hosting. I can’t possibly think of a situation where site owners would want to use this plugin to allow member uploading. Sure there may be a few that think it would be cool that have not thought it through. For the very small number of sites that really need to host user video they will be using much more complex solutions. I mean can you really tell me the benefit of having members use you as a middleman for YouTube?
I would STRONGLY caution against anyone using WPMU DEV products, but you should look at this plugin (for discussion purposes):
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/media-embeds-for-buddypress-activity/
It allows embedding of images, videos and links to user activity streams. I think you should create member galleries the same way. You could even do images this way. This would completely eliminate the need for hosting altogether. It would also mean even site owners with shared hosting could use your plugin. This would open it up to a million more BP users, instead of a very small niche market.
We have about 1 million unique visitors and use multiple severs with Rack Space. Our site is also a community for filmmakers to learn the craft of filmmaking. So we would be your target demographic for the plugin as you wrote it, so when I say I don’t believe it’s the right approach, you can believe this is something we put a lot of research into before we arrived at that conclusion. I think this plugin has great potential for allowing member to showcase and share their work, I just believe there is a more efficient way.
One other note, allowing user uploads opens you up to huge copyright issues. If you are hosting it (or even acting as a middleman) you are responsible for whatever content they upload. On the other hand if you use embeds you are protected by The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and copyright holders would have to go after YouTube etc.
This is Rahul from Buddypress-media team. Thanks for discussing many points here.
While I can’t promise anything about timeline right now, we have plans to release some paid add-ons and following things will be covered most-likely soon:
- FFMPEG-based transcoding
- CDN Integration
- Kaltura-CE support
- Per user limit (paid subscriptions for users)
- Content Moderation (something like first upload will go to admin for approval)
- File-size/formats restrictions (an admin may want to force users to allow MP4+H.264 videos saving server resources)
- Ability to records from webcam (live-recording rather than file-upload form disk)
Above list is not complete but only list things that we plan to accomplish in next 2 months.
We will be also providing fair deal of actions & filters so other developers can create add-ons for BuddyPress media.
Thanks again for early support & valuable feedback.
One other idea…
Maybe you should consider creating a “Lite” version that just uses embeds. The type of video/etc. uploading you are implementing is more for larger complex sites that would be willing to pay for those features so you could charge for the full version that does uploads and give away the “Lite” version. This would mean your plugin could be used by a larger number of sites so it would help grow your support community while at the same time provide you a revenue stream.
Just a thought.
We will maintain a free version with.
Paid add-on will be for stuff which needs considerable efforts from our team.
One other thing you should consider is uploading to YouTube will never work in the real world. If you have everyone uploading to one account anyone can have all your videos deleted just by uploading one porn video, copyrighted video or other content that violates their policy. You are giving complete control away to any fool that would then have the power to complete destroy your site.
Hi @mcguffin @shawn,
Butting into the conversation! BuddyPress Media has undergone tremendous evolution. We've also released two addons to BuddyPress Media that add video conversion facility:
While the FFMPEG converter relies on an FFMPEG node installation documented with the product, the Kaltura Addon connects to your Kaltura deployment to automatically convert video and audio. @shawn you might be interested in our Kaltura addon to simplify your implementation.
Regards.
Also, by the way, the enabling/disabling of media is underway and almost complete. BuddyPress media 2.5 is in the offing and will be released soon!