MediaMosa in brief

MediaMosa is a high-quality, scalable, open source media distribution platform based on the Drupal CMS. It offers user-level and administrator-level access to (shared) data repositories, metadata databases, and transcoding and streaming servers. Any type of media content (audio, video, documents, etc.) can be managed in MediaMosa.

End users can search for, play, upload and transcode media. The media can be tagged with metadata, which can be searched using CQL queries.

MediaMosa is built based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Part of what this means is that MediaMosa is divided into a back end and a front end. The back end consists of a number of web services, components and data repositories. This is where all the tasks are carried out, such as transcoding, uploading and playback. The front end consists of applications used by end users and administrators to communicate with the back end, using Representational State Transfer (REST).

The major advantage of this software architecture is its flexibility. Components can be combined easily to implement web services that can be accessed using front-end applications. The division between front end and back end results in better performance because tasks are carried out on central servers. The most important features of MediaMosa are:

  • Provides a storage platform for any type of content
  • Streams Flash, H.264 MPEG-4 and Windows Media
  • Transcoding based on FFmpeg
  • Flexible Metadata Element Sets

MediaMosa offers many web services, including the following:

  • Video playback (PlayProxy? HTML wrapper)
  • Authentication (D-Bus for EGA)
  • Authorisation (domain, realm, group or a combination)
  • Upload (PUT, POST, FTP)
  • Transcoding (converting media files from one format to another)
  • Media Management
  • Search function: Contextual Query Language (CQL), level 2
  • OAI-PMH: DC, QDC, LOM, CZP
  • Logging and statistics
  • Automatically generates stills