History

First Introduction

  • Make it straightforward to centralize, mirror, publish and share (multimedia) resources
  • Harvest means gathering
  • Extensibility, modularity, simplicity.
  • Manipulate, integrate, mashup.

It's like Yahoo Pipes, but extended, with storage and mirroring, under GPL license and self-controlled !

Use Cases

A general use of UHM allows to :
  • Merge, filter, mirror or redistribute items from existing podcasts
  • Mirror items from corporation websites like youtube, dailymotion
  • Share multimedia items between friends sending links to a mailbox
  • Create a Video podcast from a website that publishes videos inside articles
  • Gather multimedia content from social bookmarking websites
  • Mashup RSS items with third-party Internet content

Check some real-life UHM use cases

We even think of :
  • Bittorrent automated creation for harvested content
  • Copyleft music and video centralization
  • Mashup of subtitles for TV series episodes, iCal calendars sources, etc.
  • Sources like Twitter, Pownce, Last.fm, Flickr ...
  • Rename, filter, merge, crop, blend, etc.

It is not all about multimedia ! The UHM can manipulate every kind of data. Extend UHM should be a simple task !

Media source

A media source is a module that brings in multimedia items. A multimedia item can be :
- a direct URi to multimedia content (http://site.com/file.ogg)
- an URi to a webpage containing media (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6bT-61xgAs, http://tvbruits.org/spip.php?article976)
- attachments in a harvested mailbox

Harvest !

We define our harvests using steps in a workflow, according to use case. The combination of simple steps gives an infinite number of possibilities.

A step can be seen as a node in a directed acyclic graph.

Here is an example of a channel mirroring a podcast, sending items by email and creating a new podcast with mirrored files :


  +------------+     +--------+    +---------+     +------------+
  | PodcastSrc +-----| Mirror +----| StoreDB |-----| PublishRSS |
  +------------+     +--------+    +---------+     +------------+
                         |
                         |         +----------+
                         |---------| SendMail |
                                   +----------+
  • Multimedia items are brought from one node to its successors
  • Each node has parameters and can several inputs as well as outputs
  • Each node has a simple implementation.

Publish media

The idea of the UHM is to centralize multimedia items, but also publish and share harvested content. It should be capable of publishing :
  • podcasts using remote or mirrored files
  • to email addresses
  • to remote web folders (FTP)
  • to remote websites (blogs XML-RPC)

How does it work ?

  • You define channels and configure their nodes
  • UHM will execute each channel
  • UHM runs on your box (in a crontab for example)

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