Tutturu is a project to streamline autonomous video publishing via podcasts and torrents with focus on decentralization of media distribution. It’s goal is to provide an easy solution for source material sharing across wide networks and the publication of media based on subscription and syndication of metadata.
The practical aim is to build a Tutturu device that would be installed and configured in a media studio, in order to provide an easy way of content publishing and workflow to interoperate with no dependence on a central institution or proprietary format.
The device itself consists of a software appliance based on the Ubuntu server (via turnkeylinux lamp), that is providing a shared folder in the local network from where content is being encoded, seeded and published on remote web site. Other parts of infrastructure include publication website (drupal) and separate tracker (currently being integrated into drupal module).
It is intended for sharing source material (usually licensed on a Creative Commons license) among artists and journalists. There might be other use scenarios of that system (say piracy) but first of all it is planed as a box installed in “free-culture” multimedia studio.
Basic schema of the process:
- a file is being copied into a local folder over samba
- drupal picks up the file (via media mover)
- extraction of metadata
- encoding (ffmpeg)
- generation of a torrent out of the original media (basic shell script)
- copy torrent +move original file to a local directory for seeding
- send encoded file + torrent to a remote drupal site
- publish all on the local site (kind of video archive)
- local torrent client picks up media for seeding
- remote site picks up the media, and publish it as both a torrent podcast and “web video”
- remote tracker pickup torrents from feed and starts to track it
- remote client (audience) download media via podcast client (miro) or bittorent (deluge with flexrss)
Please note, it is currently not ready for general usage: the basic prototype works, but it is very rough in configuration and usage, if you are interested in hacking it, tar package on top of lamp stack is available on per request basis (contact)
Code components:
- Publication website: drupal, feedapi
- Semantics transmission metadata standart
- Device components: Turnkeylinux lamp, Drupal cms, Media mover, wTorrent
External links:
Contact details:
- email: szczym@obin.org
- irc channel: #tutturu at irc.freenode.net
