As an open-source project, the BlueWall Media Framework benefits tremendously from the involvement of outside developers -- almost requires it, in fact. We are currently in private beta with limited partners, but your involvement can begin now -- let us know how you'd like to use it and we'll take your needs under serious consideration as we're putting the finishing touches on our API.
Initially, the API will take the form of a PHP library which connects to the core of the BlueWall Media Framework and provides a set of functions that can retrieve important information for you. Including a single file in your PHP script or application will make all that horsepower available to you. Eventually this will be extended to also give you the ability to issue commands to the core -- batch-converting a specific subset of your videos into an iPad-optimized format, for example.
Eventually we will also implement the API as a web service that can be accessed via JSON or XML remotely from any language of your choosing. We're able to do this because there's strong support for web services in Drupal, the software package we used to create the admin panel you'll probably be using, but the API will allow you to connect to any software you want -- first to the PHP-based applications, and then eventually to anything with a network connection.
The BlueWall Media Framework also abstracts away most of the headaches involved with managing media metadata, leaning heavily on awesome open-source metadata editing and extraction packages like AtomicParsley and GetID3. Format conversions and codecs are handled largely by the toolkit included with FFmpeg, an amazing command-line conversion utility for Linux that can create almost any audio or video output you desire with a slight tweak to the command string. Some key presets optimized for various playback contexts and hardware devices will be included, but you can also create your own.
The BlueWall Media Framework is in limited private beta until September. Get in touch if you'd like to be notified when it is released. And if you really can't wait, we can talk about that too.
