Internet Archive

We're proud to release version 0.0 of an include file that will make the Embedded Video Field module work with videos uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Update: Now at 0.1. Now will use whatever mpeg4 it finds first in the RSS feed, rather than only mpeg4s derived by the Archive.

This works with Drupal 5.

Rough draft of instructions:

1. Install the emfield module on your site.
2. Download archive.inc.txt, rename it to archive.inc, and upload it to yourwebsite.com/sites/all/modules/emfield/contrib/video_cck/providers
3. Go to the "Content Types" admin screen for your site at yourwebsite.com/admin/content/types
4. "Edit" your content type and add an Embedded Video field.
5. Configure the field to work with The Internet Archive.
6. Now when you create a node of this content type, just paste in the URL of a page at archive.org in the "URL" text field. For example, http://www.archive.org/details/videojam_521
7. When you save the node, you'll see a Flash-based player with your video, as well as a link to download the mp4 version, a link back to the original page at archive.org, and whatever description was entered. (Note that you have to add your own Title.)

For questions or comments, please e-mail mike@wccatv.org.

Looks like newly-uploaded mpeg2s are being derived into 512kbps mp4s, rather than 256kb and 64kb like they used to. Very nice!

Lately the Archive deriver has been breaking on my mpeg2s, spending hours and hours before giving up, and leaving me only with the original mpeg2 and a new flv. Under this new regime, no problems so far. All hail the Archive.

Internet Archive bigwig Brewster Kahle is the guest on this week's This Week In Tech. Good listening.

Link

For the past 23 hours or so, FTP uploads to the Internet Archive are giving me intermittent "transfer stalled" messages. I configured my FTP client to be more persistent, so it would stop timing out, but I'm still only 40% done with my big file :(

And we all breathe a sigh of relief.

Looks like there's some trouble with items uploaded to the Internet Archive between 10 and 30 days ago.

Here's the error:
"The item you have requested has a problem with one or more of the metadata files that describe it, which prevents us from displaying this page."

At least the items still exist; if they didn't the error would be "Exhausted all choices for locator URLs. Item cannot be found."

The Archive, for all their good points, are notoriously silent about these sorts of problems. A quick note that "Nobody's files are lost, and they'll reappear soon" would go a long way to making Archive users less anxious.

As it is, I'm wondering if I should hustle and look for copies of the currently-missing files on my computers, and ask friends if they've downloaded copies.