It’s nice to be able to access your video and movie collection while on the move.
Hosting your movie collection in a remote datacenter is much more secure than having to open ports on your home router, also negating the need to leave your home PC switched on when leaving your home.
More and more people are watching their movies from online servers they are renting, which gives peace of mind as the security of the home system cannot be jeopardised.
The remote server is treated just like any other web-streaming service such as Netflix and Amazon for example, by all the devices in the home.
Those lucky to have multiple homes or a holiday retreat, have the same online movie streaming experience no matter which residence they are in.
Once you have bought a domain, you need to rent your web-hosting.
If you rent a Virtual Private Server, it’s like having your very own server, free to install whatever software you want.
You can obtain a domain and VPS from www.openhost.co.nz
Such a solution is quite flexible, because you can install all sorts of additional software that facilitates transcoding, where your videos can be converted to a different format, making the streaming much more efficient.
Drupal is a great CMS (content management system) for hosting videos, as Drupal is modular.
There are many video modules for Drupal, by far the most popular is the “video” module.
While there is a learning curve with Drupal, it’s possible to build a website quickly that would catalog a video collection for playback by the website owner.
Furthermore, there are many sub-modules that are designed to work with the Drupal video module.
Another Drupal video module, is the Kaltura video module, which works with either a remote or local Kaltura video streaming server.
A local Kalura video streaming server can be installed on your VPS (Virtual Private Server).
While Drupal is serving the web pages, it’s Kaltura that is doing the heavy lifting. Kaltura is described as a “Video Operating System”
Of course, in the way of CMS (Content Management Systems), there are more choices beyond Drupal such as WordPress and Joomla.
WordPress has a very good plugin for managing your movie collection called wpmovielibrary. It can import movie data from TheMovieDB.
Another great plugin is “Movie Database”, which gives you extended stats on how often you watch each movie. Furthermore, you can add entries about hard-copies such as blu-rays and who you’ve lent them to!
The movie star for Joomla is the AllVideosPlugin which is a complete media management solution.
Like the video module for Drupal, the AllVideosPlugin can handle third party videos on providers such as youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Flickr Video and loads more.
Finally, we shouldn’t forget the template. Thankfully there are movie templates available for all three CMS solution.
