Creating a "video submission" engine

[Mr. Pink]

Perhaps this was already discussed, but I was not able to find any such thread...

Anyway, I am building a site for musicians and would like to have a "showcase" chapter where visitors would be able to submit their own videos, to promote themselves, like on YouTube. I think this would build a good community of repeat visitors.

Does anyone know how I may be able to set this up? Preferably, I would like it to look and function as much as possible like YouTube, because that is what people are used to, these days.

Thanks...

[Chris]

I know member Emancipator I think has a video submission system on one of his sites.

Generally, from the bandwidth and everything else, I would consider just having them submit to youtube and them build a frontend whereby they can link to and easily embed their youtube videos on your site.

[Mr. Pink]

Thank you for your reply, Chris.

...I would consider just having them submit to youtube and them build a frontend whereby they can link to and easily embed their youtube videos on your site.

This sounds good. Do you have any idea how I would go about doing that? I know I would need some kind of script that writes and reads form a database, but I don't know where to find one. If you have any idea, or could point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.

Thanks...

PS - I will also check Emancipator's profile.

[Chris]

It would need to be custom. You'd need to learn PHP more or hire it out.

[Todd W]

Storing the videos is a good idea if you can watermark them yourself and take out the 1st frame. FFMPEG I believe does this... it's a total nightmare to install but it works. I installed it on 1 of my servers for this exact purpose and haven't had time to write my own video upload software yet...

I plan to make one where users can submit niche related videos and share/etc like a youtube. My site is almost 6yrs old though and has a decent following, starting a clone of youtube may be harder or the music industry may be larger by 100x than my niche too.

The youtube idea is good way to start out probably, especially if you are not going to program it yourself.
My idea is to convert to FLV for web-play and allow premium members download the actual videos.