Open source image, audio, video hosting - MediaCrush

Question

Hey guys! I've been building MediaCrush over the past few months, with my friend (and fellow Arch user) Jose Diez, and several other open-source contributors. It hosts video, audio, images, vectors - over 500 different file formats are supported. You can upload almost anything (like a mp3, flac, mp4, webm, avi, bmp, svg, cr3...) and it'll be converted (losslessly where possible) to browser-friendly formats. You get a link to share, like this: https://mediacru.sh/Fx73lJhU0_Id
The site is completely open source. You can run your own clone of MediaCrush locally with the help of the detailed instructions in the README. Pull requests are welcome, too, so you can help make it better if you please. It's written in Python and it's built on the shoulders of giants like ImageMagick and ffmpeg. Our whole shop is Arch - our dev machines are Arch, and all of the production servers (web servers, processing servers, and storage servers) are running Arch.
✓ Share images, audio, video, vectors
✓ Super fast hosting
✓ Hotlinking/embedding
✓ Create albums of media
✓ Keep track of files you've uploaded (optional)
✓ Privacy-first data policies (link)
✓ Excellent public API (link)
✓ Entirely open source
✓ HTTPS only
✓ Ad-free
You can upload files right away at https://mediacru.sh, or set up your own instance to host files on. Feel free to hop into the IRC channel for a chat, too: #mediacrush on irc.freenode.net. There are a couple of other cool things that you might like. For example, MediaCrush-cli lets you upload files from the comfort of your favorite shell.
$ mediacrush --album *.jpg # example usage
You can find it in the AUR as mediacrush-cli. There are also browser extensions that make it easy to rehost images around the web: Firefox, Chromium (both are open source, of course 1, 2). I also have a little script that uploads screenshots via scrot straight to MediaCrush.
Here are some example URLs to play with: Video, or audio, or a GIF (we convert those to video, makes them load faster), or how about an album?
Let me know what you think! I hope you like it.
Last edited by SirCmpwn (2014-02-04 01:26:43)

Answer 1

SirCmpwn wrote:
likytau wrote:
a GIF (we convert those to video, makes them load faster)
practice, but of course it totally breaks on pixel art.
You're absolutely right. The reason we decided to convert GIF to video is because the majority of GIFs are sourced from video, and GIF is a poor choice for that kind of media. However, GIF is well suited to pixel art. The original GIF doesn't go away when you upload - if you want to host GIFs on MediaCrush like that, I suggest hotlinking straight to it: https://mediacru.sh/1hBjPzWZGy6m.gif. That being said, we strive to make the conversion as close as possible to the original, and I feel that in both cases, the final result is close enough to give the general idea, and then you get the original GIF when you click "Download", so it's suitable for sharing.
Yes, I agree that it is quite good quality, the problem only arises when the output must be 100% accurate as with pixel art.
It's good to know that the original does not go away.. Especially for formats like GPL, this is quite helpful.
Files are run through detect, which determines what kind of file they are, collects some metadata, and selects a processor. Processing is distributed, which is accomplished through Celery (with Redis as a broker).
I see, excellent summary. With the help of that, I have written a GPL detector (which maybe doesn't work fully, I had no idea whether simply open()ing the file would be okay with your architecture):
def detect_gpl(path):
# XXX don't know how to access path. Is standard open() ok?
with open(path, 'r') as f:
lines = [f.readline().rstrip() for v in range(3)]
if (lines[0] != 'GIMP Palette' or
(not lines[1].startswith('Name: ')) or
(not lines[2].startswith('Columns: '))):
return None
return {
'type': 'application/x-gimp-palette',
'extra': None,
'flags': None,
Haven't written rendering code yet, but I think imagemagick can do the job; it would probably be possible to generate an XPM directly in Python code, that ImageMagick could then convert.
Regarding the other formats you mentioned, could you offer some test files, and a general idea of what they are and how we might go about detecting them and supporting them?
Yeah, I'll provide some shortly. You may not want to support them all, but here's a summary of what they are:
* GPL : Gimp Palette. Used by GIMP (duh), Inkscape, Mypaint, Scribus ... most OSS graphics apps. Identified as above (well, my routine above is actually fairly paranoid -- just checking that the first line content equals 'GIMP Palette' is normally enough to detect it). Sample files here.
* ora: OpenRaster. 'Generic layered image format', hopefully will become a standard for layered raster graphics interchange. MyPaint's native format, supported by GIMP and Krita. Convertable to PNG using calligraconverter[1].
* kra: Krita's native format. Convertable to PNG using calligraconverter[1].
* xcf, xcf.gz, xcf.bz: GIMP's native format. Convertable to PNG using xcf2png (from 'xcftools' package)
* ase : probably don't bother -- this is Aseprite's native format, which is not particularly common in the wild. I don't know of a tool that converts it. I just tried it for testing's sake.
* webp: Google's WebP format. Already handled, but you seem to currently convert it to a video even if the image is static.
[1] Available in the package 'calligra-extras'
You're welcome to submit pull requests; you should join the IRC channel to participate in dev chatter. Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks, I'll look at doing that once I'm familiar with the system.
Last edited by likytau (2014-02-05 05:45:51)