Can anyone who is running this explain why and how he uses it? As far as I understand it, its not a media center solution but rater a self hosted social network focused on sharing media.
How would a typical use case look like: Set up a mediagoblin instance to share vacation photos and videos with your friends?
I set this up after my first child was born so that my wife and I, along with all of the other family members could post pictures and videos of our daughter (and our family) on a machine I control. When someone babysits her and takes pictures/videos they too can post them.
This serves us in many ways. For instance, we have all of the pictures in one place, not spread over many services depending on where family members post them -- although some family members also post to facebook :( For the grandmothers and grandfathers we just give them the url instead of trying to explain a YouTube channel to them. They know how urls work, not how YouTube works.
This also serves as a backup. The server is hosted outside our apartment so the pictures we put there can be easily fetched in case something happens to our apartment (and computers - but this can also be fixed with a backup server, this is a side effect).
Basically, family album in one place -- no matter who the photographer is (and backup).
It's not an automatic backup system... and it's not a copy of all photos/videos on our computers.
The pictures/videos we want to keep (would not want to lose in a fire) we upload to our MediaGoblin instance. MediaGoblin saves them in a folder on the server (the original media files and the processed ones). If something happens to our home, we'll be able to easily fetch the most precious images from the server.
The only thing I'd have to work around is that every media file is stored in a separate folder along with the processed files so I would have to write a script to "go into each folder and fetch the file that doesn't end with medium.[ext] and thumbnail.[ext]". Come to think of it, it might be worth it to just write a "Download all originals" plugin since MediaGoblin already knows the originals... but since our apartment hasn't been destroyed I'm not in a hurry.
1. there will be not many people watching it to begin with.
2. even if there are, it's distributed across so many media goblins install. break down youtube access for (1/3 * number of videos they have) = number of different DMCA requests the MAFIAA lawyers will have to work out. It just will not scale as it does now.
How would a typical use case look like: Set up a mediagoblin instance to share vacation photos and videos with your friends?