Experiences with ClipShare Pro 2.0
There’s quite a market for YouTube clones, it seems. I’ve been recently working with three of these scripts, namely the commercial ClipShare Pro 2.0, the free PHPmotion and the Real Estate Video Upload Software I wrote a while ago. My experiences with these scripts are quite mixed, though.
Requirements
All of the scripts are based on PHP and MySQL - there might be other solutions out there, but since my clients all had the traditional LAMP setup I didn’t bother searching for alternatives.
For encoding, all of the scripts named use the same combination of MEncoder, ffmpeg to support the Flash video format, the ffmpeg PHP extension and FLVTool2.
Installing these software packages isn’t that hard unless you’re on something different than a .deb-based Linux system: The Debian multimedia repository provided me with the MEncoder and FFmpeg packages, I installed Ruby to run FLVTool2 (which is a Ruby script) and installed ffmpeg-php from Atomo64’s Debian Repository (thanks to Raphaël for this one).
If you’re on another system, you might end up with a lot of compiling, though.
Once you got all these things in place and made sure your php.ini settings allow the exec(), shell_exec() and system() functions you can start doing the real installataion.
Installing
This article will just contain the review of ClipShare, PHPmotion will follow later, so stay tuned.
To install ClipShare, you’ll have to import a SQL file into your database using phpMyAdmin, open some files and adjust some variables. Not easy, however not that difficult, either. Luckily they have an installation service for their customers, so you can get the software installed for you. These guys at the installation service will, however, compile the software on your server (why don’t they just use an .rpm or .deb package - what about updating that software?) and they don’t seem to be that smart either. They couldn’t fix some weird issue my client had and after some debugging I found safe_mode for PHP-CLI to be turned on. This is something I expect them to check for - they get paid for that!
Customizing
ClipShare comes with a template engine, so you can achieve any design you can imagine. However if you just want to adjust the design that came with ClipShare (speaking of version 2.0, there’s a table-free CSS design coming with version 2.5) this is where you undergo a web developer’s nightmare. table-deserts as far as your screen is big, mixed with some invalid attribute notation (e.g. width=450), “borders” are colored td-elements. Long story short, their HTML code is evil.
Now you might say, that’s version 2.0, you said earlier they released 2.5 with a CSS-based template. Well, check it out at http://www.clipsharedemo.com/ - it comes with a little 864 validation errors and 13 external JavaScripts plus some neat inline JavaScript. It’s clearly a step in the right direction, but it’s not better than the table-based design they had before.
ClipShare’s PHP code is completely editable, which is certainly a pro - however, you might end up adding some code yourself: My client wanted the user avatar to be displayed in the sidebar of a single-video page (like YouTube does it). ClipShare doesn’t come with this data per default or at least I couldn’t find it since there’s no documentation to check, so I had to get it from the database myself.
Summary
Overall, ClipShare does it’s job, however there’s quite a lot of room for improvements at the installation service, the templates and the documentation.