PHPMotion is a truly free open source media social networking platform supporting video and audio social networking.
It’s downloadable from www.phpmotion.com website after you had registered to the software support forum.

Latest stable version was 1.2 but I tested and evaluated version 2 beta which worked without any crashes and with only small inconveniences.

The product installation was quick however you must have lot of open source modules pre-installed to your server, including LAME MP encoder, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder and MPlayer, FFMpeg-PHP, GD Library 2, etc. which was taking a week of my time to get those running afterwards to find out that my service provider does not support background processes and MP3, MPEG files download.

So you should consider the hosting service where those modules are already installed. PhpMotion website lists four of hosting ready service providers, where the starting price $2.99 was per month.

The administration panel allows setup the site basics and paths for ffmpeg, flvtool and mencoder, maximum sizes and parameters for conversion, auto approval, commenting options and several limits.

General system messages where customizable so I assume that the system can be setup to use any language.

It also shows general statistics, such as how many videos have in the system separated by private and public and how many videos were played today many plays. It also shows member statistics, such as how many joined today, waiting approval and how many suspended members; group and video comment statistics.

I was lacking the true site statistics about number of visitors and bandwidth usage per day, week, and month.

The member’s panel allows approving, suspending and deleting members.

Administrators are able to manage advertisements in top, bottom, left, right and in home page which all should be entered as HTML code.

The module also manages media approval, media categories and comments.

There was a possibility to send HTML or text newsletters to all site members.

The system shows biggest groups and you are able to set groups as featured and videos as featured with both have also separate management option.

Featured audio was not yet implemented.

Pictures can be set to be approved and the approval process will be done by the site administrator.

Videos and comments can be also flagged.

I found also that there was additional look for the site already available called Zer0One Darkbase which I installed to my service. However this was not working with version 2, so hopefully more web designer will be interested to develop their own themes to newest version.

Site outlook can be customized easily by modifying the CSS files and HTML templates.

 

Usability

The main page shows most recent and most popular videos.

After the login you will be redirected to the page where selections are: Continue to watch video now, Listen my audio now, Go to my favourites, Complete/Update my profile, Upload/manage my videos now, Upload/manage my audio now, My friends and Privacy notification settings.

Profile features where not customizable by the administration module so user is limited to picture, basic information like gender and birth date, location information and boxes for “More about me”, “Interest and hobbies”, “Favorite movie”, “My type of music”, “More about my high school”, “College/University”, “Work Place” and personal website/blog.

Those information boxes were not customizable using the administrations module, which could have given site owners more customization possibilities to separate target groups.

When uploading new video, besides the title, tags, category and description, there was a possibility to specify the location recorded and does this video allow comments, embedding and will it be a private or public video.

After the upload video goes to be processed in background instead immediate play so you should wait until this process completes.

As video upload process started from description screen, audio upload starts from uploading the file first and then you are able to enter (or modify) the artist, track, description and tags; play length, year published, Album and location recorded. As for the videos, musicians are able to specify the comments, embedding and public options also to your audio files.

After the upload all audio files will be processed again which was odd as there should be not much converting to be done for MP3 files.

The videos section lists featured, most viewed, most recent and most discussed videos. User can bookmark the video to Blink, Digg, Furl, Deli and Google, report abuse, Add to your favorites, Download video, Add to your playlist, Create new Playlist and Share with friends.

Creating a new playlist had a bug because the dialog didn’t close even the playlist was successfully created.

Add to playlist worked fine without any pop up window, the selection of playlists opened in the main screen same way as Share with Friends, where the friend email address should be entered.

Allow comments and Allow embedding parameters in video uploading seems to be not working as I tested the beta version, so everything where open even I restricted so.

When creating a new comment, instead of showing my comment immediately I just got a message that my comment was successfully created and was showing when I next time visited the page.

Each video page lists a member other videos somehow I wasn’t able to get anything listed in Related videos box.

Rating a video was done by clicking appropriate star in rating scale and took me little bit to figure out.

Audio page can be sorted also by Featured, Most played, most recent and most discussed. You can filter your search result using tags, which where classified as popular and more tags.

Audio files can be also bookmarked in Blink, Digg, Furl, Deli and Google, you can report abuse, add to favorites and download audio file.

There wasn’t any Playlist options yet implemented to Audio files but I was able to add comments. Commenting and embedded code options used when uploading the audio file wasn’t working yet, also related audio box was always empty. Member other audio was showing properly.

The Categories tab was listing videos by category, having also options to sort them by featured, and most viewed, most recent and most discussed.

Somehow the upper menu in this page where changing from my media options to group options as when selection Groups tab it was again media options.

Hopefully this was a bug…

The group’s page starts with group listing which can be sorted by Featured, Created today and all. Members have also the possibility to create a new group.

When creating a group you have option to set group as private or public and each group will have their own URL.

The group members should be able to upload videos to the group however I wasn’t able yet to upload group video, neither to create a group comment.

Private groups where not listed in the group search page.

There is a possibility to jump group member profiles from the group page however member list was implemented as Combo Box, which could be not suitable for groups having huge amount of members and report this group as abuse to the site administrator.

From People tab I was able to search member profiles by First name, Surname, username and country.

From upload tab I was able to upload only new videos at the moment, but not yet audio files.

 

Conclusion
PHPMotion was well developed media networking platforms and even in beta, worked well. The audio possibilities besides video will allow it to be truly a media portal rather than an Youtube clone (like Clipshare).

And the main issue is that it’s free, however you should consider suitable hosting provider and website designer for your site.

From the feedback in their forum, the most issues have been media type and download configuration issues rather than bugs. Sure, there are those small issues to fix before they can launch their product.

I didn’t miss any functionality and even was considering it as a platform to launch music and video download portal for mobile phones. Even this site does not work as XHTML-MP compatible WAP pages, adding a web trigger for WAP push message should work on this platform. However, those videos must be converted to mobile 3GP format in this case and I wasn’t aware any freeware UNIX modules to do so yet.
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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