I have previously blogged about Video Hosting Options for Drupal web sites. In that discussion, I talked about Kaltura, Amazon S3 and BrightCove. Others have also commented about Viddler and Twistage.

We have recently been involved with another video site which uses the Ooyala Backlot system. For the most part, Ooyala is very similar to the tools provided by Brightcove and Kaltura, however, there are a few features that we are really impressive.

1) Extensive ADs Management System
Using the Ooyala Backlot system, the administrators can easily insert overlays, pre-rolls and other advertisement into the videos. The great thing is that a lot of these integration does not require any programming knowledge. This allows for the easy management of Ads by non technical staff members.

2) Detailed Analytics System

We've been working on a community web site project that allows users to upload videos and have discussions about the video content. We explored various video hosting options for this project, and identified a few that work well with Drupal. While most video solutions can work with Drupal, these ones have existing modules or plugins for integration, thereby reducing development time significantly:

1) Kaltura: Kaltura is an open source video-hosting and management platform. They have an integrated player and file management system that integrate with Drupal via the Kaltura video module. This module makes it simple to theme the player's pages and associated areas. Also, Kaltura hosts the first 10GB of content for free. The entry level service cost of Kaltura is about $200-$300/month. We used Kaltura for a mid-sized non-profit site and were pleased with the service quality.

S3, a great technology provided by Amazon, allows users to store an unlimited amount of files through simple web service calls. Amazon S3 is very cost effective, only charging 15 cents per gigabyte and additional charges for the bandwith that is used during retrieveing and sending files. The scalability of Amazon S3 allows video hosting sites to trust that the videos will be available at all times and will not
add to load times when playing videos.

The flashvideo module allows users to convert uploaded video files to Flash format with the help of FFMPEG. These video files after being converted can be embedded into nodes by using a special placeholder, [video], in the node body. The project page mentions that the module has been tested with two great flash players which are:

• Dash Media Player

The following is an article provided by Packt Publishing.

Third-Party Video Providers

Many sites desiring video will choose to use a third-party video provider such as YouTube or Blip.TV. This reduces the bandwidth requirement from their server, is easy to include in their posts, and allows videos to be easily shared virtually by users across the Internet.

The easiest way, without further configuration of a basic Drupal installation, for an administrator to include a third-party video is to simply paste the video's embedded code in a post. Most video providers will offer a snippet of HTML that may be copied from a particular video page, which will embed the video.

However, this requires using a filter that will allow <object>, <embed>, and <param> tags. But since they open the door to attacks on the site, they should only be used by administrators and trusted editors. You could also use the Full HTML filter, but this is even more dangerous as allowing that filter to be generally used would open the site to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.