Video archive of the US Congress
Our media servers that stores oggs for content prior to ~June 09~ is currently down for maintenance. We hope to have it back up shortly. Recent content is working, such as Obama’s speech last week before a rare joint session of Congress.
Add comment by aphid
Technology Review on Open Video
David Talbot from Technology Review has put together a good article on Open Video. Building off of the Open Video Alliance event he pieces together a lot of threads of the open video movement. The article opens with early work that we did on metavid project and goes on to highlight the efforts of Mozilla, Xiph, Wikimeida, Kaltura and others in promoting open video on the web.
6 comments by dale
Just want to quickly remind people about the Apps for America v2.0 contest. Would be really nifty try and do something with the metavid apis.
Apps for America is a special contest we’re putting on this year to celebrate the release of Data.gov! We’re doing it alongside Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb and the winners will be announced at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Washington, DC at the end of the Summer.
Also wanted to mention Kaltura ( the company that I am working with on wikimedia on open video stuff ) has a contest too. As part of their community edition launch they are giving away a few prizes for developers using the kaltura open video platform:
As part of the public launch of Kaltura Community Edition and the Kaltura.org community website, we’re calling existing members of the community and new developers to take part in a cool contest and win some fun prizes!
Add comment by dale
open video alliance logo
The Open Video Alliance conference put on by the Participatory Culture Foundation and Kaltura that took place recently in New York was a great success! One of the central themes was how we can build a better web with open video technologies.
Mozilla made a call to action to the web video community and has since launched the latest version of their open source browser Firefox 3.5. With this launch the percentage of the web that has integrated native support for ogg video has been steady increasing. As the free format vs proprietary format wars start heating up I wanted to highlight some tools and recent updated features that can help you help the Internet.
These tools are principally possible because of the hard work xiph.org hackers who very early on saw the need for an open media formats. These web open video tools are part of our open video efforts at wikimedia in collaboration with Kaltura, Mozilla and other people just like you ;). And of-course we use these tools here on metavid.org 
4 comments by dale
Categories are like tags, special links that group together similar things. When applied to annotation layers, (annotation layers describe a particular period of time in a Metavid stream with a start and endpoint), categories create collections of video.
We use categories for a few different kinds of content. Some occur every day, like One Minute Speeches in the House. Others only occur once a year, like San Jacinto Day or Earth Day. Some will be limited to a particular debate, like Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and others will be relevant to any topic such as Great Poster. There are small categories like Global Warming Skepticism and huge categories like Opening Prayer; serious ones, like Remembrances and light-hearted ones like Quiet Please.
One quality nearly every category shares is incompleteness — because there is so much content (over 3000 hours) and only a few of us tagging content, many categories are missing important content. As you watch speeches on Metavid, spending the extra 5 seconds to categorize them will make them easier to find in the future. If there’s a category you find interesting or appealing, feel free to expand it yourself. If you find a speech and there’s isn’t a category that makes sense for it — start a new one!
Check out this tutorial for more information about tagging clips. You can find a list of current media categories here.
Add comment by aphid
I am inviting people to check out the add media wizard and Firefogg on test.wikipedia.org.To help test go to you user preferences on that server and enable the add media wizard gadget. You can add general feedback here
This post is cross posted on wikimedia tech blog
Basic Feature Overview:
add media wizard
The Add Media Wizard adds a little “add media” button to every edit page letting you open up media search system to inject images and movie clips into your page. Presently the media search system searches commons, archive.org and metavid.org. (note archive.org inserts are not yet working because of a redirect bug we should have that fixed soon).
firefog logo
Firefogg is the really cool extension that everyone using open video on the web should know about! It packages ffmpeg2theora transcoder letting web sites trigger clients uploads of videos from whatever local format they have. Once you have enabled the add media wizard the site upload form gets a little use Firefogg button. Which you can use to enable the transcoder.
You may also want to see Brianna’s blog post made early this year about these media features. Stay tuned for wider gadget deployment … if your can’t wait you can always add
importScriptURI('http://metavid.org/w/js2/remoteMwEmbed.js');
to your User:UserName/monobook.js page. (this will enable firefogg uploads… but we have not yet enabled copy by url uploads on the other sites so you can’t import resources from archive sites yet)
10 comments by dale
Google has started accepting applications for Summer of Code 2009. We are encouraging folks to check out the Wikimedia and Xiph/Annodex organizations. This year, in addition to participating under those organizations, I am helping out in organizing the Xiph/Annodex summer of code participation. We are trying to get the word out to get as many high quality applicants as possible. If you walk in technical, academic and open media circles please help circulate our call for submissions:
Add comment by dale
As sometimes happens in responding to a comment I ended up witting a blog post The commenter hits on a common theme around ogg / open video.
As a producer of video for the web rather then a programmer I can only say: Ogg for me has no value other then its open. That is nice and great in itself but with no professional back-end infrastructure to produce high quality webvideos without thinking about it [snip] nobody is going backward just for openness.
I agree. The present state of open video tools for professional production leave much to be desired. But the present feeling of bending backwards to use open video is about to end. We are on the forefront of rapidly shifting ecosystem and a shift of what it means to be a professional video producer.
Add comment by dale
opencongress.org
Along with a few other exciting features; Open Congress is now syndicating Metavid video! This is on the heels of Govtrack’s recent addition of Metavid feeds as well. Open Congress integration includes full support for Bills and People pages along with YouTube syndication. You can see the full scope at open congress:
Videos from Metavid, the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, and the YouTube hubs for the House and Senate. Now, for every Senator, Representative, and major bill in Congress, OpenCongress shows you embedded video footage of relevant floor speeches, official announcements, and more. It’s video, it’s awesome.
An example bill page (that has had a lot of tagging activity) is the economic stimulus bill.
1 comment by dale
The US House, having just passed the stimulus package after hours of contentious debates and procedural motions, moved on to more serious business: congratulating the winners of the Super Bowl. Here’s a short clip of somebody off-camera airing their opinion. This somehow didn’t make it into the official record. The gem is @01:26.
Add comment by aphid
MetaVid is a non-profit project of UC Santa Cruz and the Sunlight Foundation.