December 8th, 2008
Archive.org has undergone a massive transcode effort to make all their media available in the free & open format ogg theora.
This massive transcode effort by Archive.org will greatly expand interoperability with Wikimedia hosted projects and the metavid’s archive. Metavid can now use Archive.org as a transparent hosting provider for Metavid videos ensuring we can scale up with increased usage. For Wikimedia, this will make it easier for Wikipedian’s work with Archive.orgs huge collection of public domain material. Archive.org moving images collections contains hundreds of thousands of digital movies which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, legislative proceedings, and a great deal of public domain & free content licensed video. This Interoperability with Wikimedia commons makes it easier to use archive.org content to enhance Wikipedia articles.
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by dale
November 3rd, 2008
xiph.org
The xiph foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is the underlining free software video codec used here on metavid.org and elsewhere. This release paves the way for the new encoder work to become the main focus of development.
This 1.0 release marks an important step in the free media formats relentless push for wider adoption against the powerful entrenched proprietary formats. From the xiph press release:
A number of leading multimedia web groups already support Theora. Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox, the world’s most popular open source browser, will support Theora natively, as will releases of the multi-platform Opera browser. Top-10 website Wikipedia uses Theora for all of its video. “Open media formats are critical for ensuring a future where everyone can create and share media freely,” says Kat Walsh, Wikimedia Foundation board member, “and so we congratulate Xiph.org on this important achievement.” Theora’s success in these applications paves the way for wider adoption.
by dale
October 9th, 2008
The Metavid Archive has captured video and text captions from cable broadcasts of public domain house and senate footage since 2006. We have made all this content available for search and reuse in an entirely open source video platform. But the archive is not perfect, over-the-air cable broadcasts do not provide perfect sync for close captions, and live transcription is not 100% accurate.
We are now calling on visitors to share and promote the Metavid site in order to build a more perfect archive. Specifically, we are asking people to try and spend a few minutes of their time to try out the transcript improving tools. For more help on how the transcript improving process works, check out the improving transcript accuracy help section here on the wiki.
To find a transcript to improve simply search for the issue your interested in be it Iraq, Afghanistan waterboarding, telecoms immunity, FISA, Guantanamo, same-sex marriage, immigration, or the recent bailout debate. Or pull clips up by people. If you find a transcript slightly out of sync simply adjust it, that way it will be perfectly in sync for the next person 
Improving transcript segments goes a long way here on metavid because the metavid platform builds on the most powerful collaborative knowledge production platforms in existence: mediaWiki (the software that powers wikipedia), and semantic mediaWiki a powerful structured data extension to mediaWiki. Your freedom to collaborative is protected by creative commons by-sa license ensuring your freedom to reuse the archive in its entirety for any purpose as long as you don’t prevent others from doing the same.
The More Perfect Archive We are Building
These same improved transcripts are carried over when people embed posts in blogs, enhancing the content accessibility. The transcript is exportable in the open cmml timed text format it can be muxed with the ogg stream for archival distribution and is easily searched as the text is directly in the page or accessible in machine readable CMML. (not hidden or encapsulated in a proprietary player like the approach of some flash subtitle sites) Annotative layers can categorize larger stream segments of video enhancing searchability and contextualization of media segments.
Since your participation in the metavid archive semantically tags time segments and we scrape information from a half dozen open congress sites; with your participation powerful semantic queries become possible.
The site give users powerful tools to create pages that highlight particular issues for example see the bailout coverage page, and provides endless mashup opportunities. We will continue to improve the archive as we make edits to transcripts. We will continue improve the underling open source software and hopefully lay the groundwork for future collaborative video archive projects. How perfect an archive metavid becomes is only dependent on our imagination and collective participation.
by dale
September 18th, 2008
~the new metavid logo~
We have rolled out massive feature updates we have developed, the new skin and interface features developed in collaboration with the participatory culture foundation and Summer of code contributions by Stjepan Rajko. Simultaneously we are doing 1.0 release candidates for the metavid software packages: the complete metavidWiki mediaWiki extension and the stand alone html5 javascript embedding library mv_embed. This post summarizes the software updates, exciting development underway in collaboration with kaltura & wikimedia foundation and outlines the up-and-coming launch for metavid.
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by dale
July 30th, 2008
Looks like the code to support ogg vorbis/theora playback has made its way into the nightly builds of firefox! This is a really great development! Mozilla’s has announced support for native theora support in ff 3.1. This will have a hugely positive effect on promoting free formats and ensuring current “non-free” formats stay cheep or free-as-in-beer. This is particularly bold of Mozilla in they are pioneering a “more free web” than the standards groups were able to agree on. As previously discussed some industry participation in the htm5 group discouraged a free baseline web video format citing submarine patent concerns. The power of the premier open source projects to ensure support of a free software ecosystem can not be overstated. Mozilla role here is hugely important and its great to see they have taken the right path to ensure the possibility of a bright future for free and open media.
Update: see Ginger’s excellent summary with historical contextualization, Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan’s Why Ogg Matters post, coverage on bush coder blog (the firefox video integration branch developer) and Greg Maxwell’s post (one of the key supporters of ogg media on wikipedia)
by dale
July 25th, 2008
As you may have heard kaltura will be sponsoring the development of open source video integration features for wikimedia projects. The news is covered in wikimedias blog:
Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael’s work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF. I am hoping that we can make incremental improvements to Wikimedia’s video capabilities that will start to become visible to users soon.
Hopefully someday soon we will be able to insert remixes of congress videos (among others) into wikipedia articles
by dale
July 17th, 2008
wikimania 2008 is under way here in Alexandria, Egypt. Lots of good talks, and its quite warm Although not as hot here in Alexandria as it was in Cairo… anyway… here are the slides (ppt, odp) for the presentation i will give tomorrow. As with last year wikipedia weekly is providing coverage of the event.
This is the 3rd wikimania that metavid has been represented, 2006 in Boston and 2007 in Taipei were also featured on this blog
by dale
June 23rd, 2008
The Personal Democracy Forum conference is under way here in NY. A lot of really cool projects and talks I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In questioning the structure of current online political mobilization he highlighted the network capacity to build a new rather simply act in reaction to or attempt to open existing power structures. As an example Linus did not protest outside of Microsoft office for them to build a better OS, and Jimmy Wales did not throw stones at Britannica until they became more open. He points to new incorporations and ways to organize groups of people without rigid hierarchy or centralization.
In the context of video technologies there were some interesting projects as well. Remixamerica.org was showing their platform for remixing and promoting political videos using the open kaltura video editor. We will see about adding the metavid archive as a source for remixes Also mogulus was showing off their platform for realtime video broadcasting from a small portable nokia camara.
I will be giving a short demo of Metavid Tuesday afternoon.
by dale
June 18th, 2008
Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.
Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer… This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.
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by dale
June 9th, 2008
A few updates to metavidWiki have been rolled out recently, thought I would take a quick opportunity to point them out.
Search
Search now has a more “google-like” display with text links to “Watch Clip” and “Improve Transcript“. This should make it clear that you can play search results inline and gives the inline search results a larger native video resolution play window.
Remote Embedding:
The remote embedding functionality has been enhanced to include inline transcript with auto scrolling and transcript layer selection. This feature can also be used to select between language tracks. (our site currently only has a single language track) The transcript format is in CMML. So you could use the mv_embed library with other CMS systems to embed video with transcript selection.
Near Future
Our summer of code student Stjepan Rajko is hard at work on adding in compatibility with flash flv video clips. This will enable “html5 like” syntax with ogg video and could use flash video as a backup. Sort of a supper version of Mike Chambers hack with all the added benefits of mv_embed library: inline transcripts/translations , references to download the clip, embed it, playlists etc
by dale
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