FMC - The fliegwerk mediacenter

A simple mediacenter based on pure PHP without Javascript using only current browser features

Installation

You need:

• any computing device with up-to-date software and network access
• a working web server with PHP support
• some video files

1. Sort and tag your videos described in the configuration section.
2. Copy the php files in your http directory:

   # cp index.php config.php search.php main.css /path/to/http
   

3. Link your prepared video directory with the following command:

   # ln -s /path/to/videos /path/to/http/movies
   

4. Install for security reasons the available .htaccess file or if your web server do not support such files configure it with the contents of this file. The configuration prevents access from non-local networks.
5. Enable the web server to follow symlinks and configure PHP that it can access your prepared video directory.

Usage

Simply enter the URI or IP address of your device serving the website. Now you will see all available video files placed in the prepared directory. You can use the search bar at the top to search for specific titles, and the search will give you titles partial matched with your title, too.

Configuration

Directory structure

The video directory has the following structure:

/path/to/videos/
├── My awesome title/
|   ├── artwork.jpg
|   ├── cover.jpg
|   ├── data.json
|   └── video.mp4
├── My next awesome title/
|   ├── artwork.jpg
|   ├── cover.jpg
|   ├── data.json
|   └── video.mp4
├── ...

In the root directory are one directory for each title named as you like. In these directories there must be the following files:

• an artwork.jpg image in wide-format which will show before the video metadata loaded in the browser
• a cover.jpg image in upright-format which will show in the video list for this title
• a data.json metadata file which contains all important information for the title (see Metadata format)
• a video.mp4 video file which actually delivers the video

Metadata format

The data.json file for every title has the following format:

{
  "title": "Your video title which is also the string to search for",
  "subtitle": "Nice subtitle to your video",
  "release": "The release of your video in ISO time-format e.g. 2009-10-01T06:58:00Z",
  "director": "Who directed your video?",
  "description": "A nice description placed below your video",
  "genre": [
    "genre",
    "of",
    "video"
  ],
  "copyright": "Some nice copyright information to your video",
  "badges": [
    "hd-720p",
    "hevc-h265",
    "aac-128k"
  ]
}

All information will be parsed for every title and showed on the website. The badges array contains the file names (without extension) that are stored as [name].svg in the badges directory. "hd-720p", for example, would render the file badges/hd-720p.

Useful tools

Simple installer

If you do not want to copy files around you can use the simple installer:

# ./installer.sh

Artwork compressor

If you have many titles with artwork and covers in raw size the browser have to download each image. This is bandwidth consuming. So you can use another simple tool that compresses all artwork and cover images to a more useful level. Please install imagemagick with your favorite package manager before you use this tool. Go to your prepared video directory and execute:

$ cd /path/to/video
$ /path/to/git/repo/tools/optimize-thumbnails

Or even better copy this tool to your local binary directory and make it executable:

# cp tools/optimize-thumbnails /usr/local/bin/
# chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/optimize-thumbnails

So you do not need the git repo at all.

The thumbnail optimizer runs over every directory in your current working directory and looks for [folder]/artwork.jpg and [folder]/cover.jpg and compresses it to the given size.

No fear! The tool backups every image before compression and adds a -full to the filename, for example artwork.jpg -> artwork-full.jpg.

If an image already has the target size no further compression will occur, and the tool will skip it.

After you added a title directory to your video directory and prepared it, simply call the tool and only the new images will be compressed.

Video file tagging

This tool automatically extracts information from a prepared video directory and imbeds them as mp4 atoms in the video file.

Please install:

• node for server side javascript,
• imagemagick for cover compression,
• AtomicParsley for mp4 metadata editing

with your favorite package manager.

Copy the script to your local binary directory:

# cp tools/tag-video-file /usr/local/bin/
# chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/tag-video-file

After installation go into a prepared directory and execute:

$ cd /path/to/videos/my-awesome-title/
$ tag-video-file

Finished!

Issues and Contributing

If you have any issues or suggestions, feel free to open an issue or write us: https://www.fliegwerk.com/contact

Project Information

This is a project by fliegwerk: https://www.fliegwerk.com/