OSTube: DIY YouTube

YouTube blocked? TeacherTube not quite what you’re looking for? Ever wish you could just do the darn thing yourself? I recently discovered that you CAN!

Via a Tweet from BudTheTeacher, I found a link to WeberTube. If you check it out, you’ll find it’s remarkably similar to YouTube, except with the abilty to upload pictures and documents as well. Users can create profiles, rate videos, watch them there or embed them elsewhere. And it looks GOOD. I was so impressed that I poked around until I found a link back to the application they used to build it.

I’d never heard of it before, but it turns out to be an Open Source project called OSTube.

osTube is the first content management system for media content (MCMS) – a basic framework for creating websites similar to YouTube, Veoh, and Revver. After the successful release of osTube 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1 we have just published the brand new 2.2 version of osTube – a quantum leap in player-functionality and CMS-scalability.

A complete revision and further development of current features as well as numerous new features guarantee even better usability of the framework. Also, many features requested by the osTube community are now part of version 2.0. The addition of AJAX, social bookmarking services and extended search capabilites are just a few key-aspects that will make the implementation of osTube more seamless than ever before.

There are premium versions available that allow you to insert ads into the videos, rotate banners and other such silly things. But for a school, the community FREE version is just peachy. On the backend it looks like you can maintain all the controls you might want, including moderation, video approval queues and other such things.

Pretty darn sweet considering the price. Definitely worth checking, whether for public consumption or for use behind a walled garden.

5 Comments

Chris Craft
9/27/2008

Can’t run it on Bluehost. They don’t allow ffmpeg, say it takes up too much juice on a shared environment. So sayeth the bluehostforum.com folks.

Chris

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Paul Bogush
10/5/2008

I love http://edublogs.tv as an alternative to youtube or teacher tube. Works every time, makes it past the filter, and no buffering issues. You can also download audio to it. Easily grabs youtube videos or can download your own and it doesn’t take an hour of your time. I stopped using teachertube months ago.

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