LFHS New Media Website

Sophomore year of high school I enrolled in my high school’s New Media course.

The New Media program boasted a pretty stellar clase of talented students working with a passionate instructor to create all sorts of digital media, mainly video.

To share their media, students often uploaded video to Google Drive or other file sharing services. Maintaining a curated catalog of student media to share with the community was a difficult chore.

I created a web app to provide a place for students to upload and share videos while providing instructors with the tools to control permissions and manage uploaded content.

The original site looked like this:

But a year or two later I completed a redesign:

The site was written in the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack that was fairly popular at the time. It was hosted on Amazon AWS EC2 and leveraged S3 and Cloudfront for storing and serving media. FFmpeg was used to read media properties and generate thumbnail imagery.

Throughout the next few years it saw regular updates and added functionality. After over a decade of service it was finally retired in 2022.

Notable Features

• Role based access control where students can register by confirming their student email, then be placed into the appropriate student permissions role by an instructor or teaching assistant.
• A hierarchical tag system, allowing admins to create a tree of tags with permissions for which roles are permitted to upload, manage, or view media associated with a given tag.
• Automatic verification of media files uploaded to ensure they conform to format and size/bitrate constraints.
• Thumbnail and poster generation with custom timecode selection and text overlays
• Embed code generation to allow embedding of videos in other websites.
• Homepage carousel showing poster previews of videos for tags selected to be featured by admins.
• Browse and search videos by tags and keywords.

The source code is available on GitHub.

Video Metadata Sidebar

Video Poster Editor