Help build a better Internet with Open Video

July 7th, 2009

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

I will quickly cover solutions for easy encoding, embedding & hosing.

Update: Also see the xiph.org page on html5 video
Also see Silvia’s round up of javascript libraries for embedding <video>

Encoding: As mentioned earlier Firefogg is in-browser extension to let you encode to ogg theora with the latest and greatest theora encoder. It features an easy to use api to integrate it into your site. You can also encode to a local file. Simply point your browser at firefogg.org grab the extension and start making ogg video today! If you prefer to have your video transcoded by some hosting service see below.

Embedding: The problem with using the video tag with free formats has always been browser adoption. You want to create a better Internet but don’t want to lose visitors or get complaints about not being able to play the video on your site. Fortunately many people have come up many excellent solutions to the problem. I will quickly highlight the mv_embed solution. The idea is simple:

Add the following javascript (or copy it to your server its all open source code)

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://metavid.org/w/js2/mwEmbed/mv_embed.js"></script>

then in your page freely use the video tag.

<video src="mymovie.ogg" poster="myposter.jpg" >

Pretty simple The video is rewritten and it support playback in IE6-8, old version of firefox and safari (if the users has java or some video plugin like VLC) You can also use it with flash video fallback if you want to minimally inconvenience your user, but I recommend sticking to only ogg formats now that Firefox 3.5 is out.

But wait.. thats not all…

It lets you build a consistent interface across underlining plugins and is themeable using jquery ui.

It also supports exposing remote embedding, download links and linkbacks making it easy to share the video.

Hosting The neat thing about  open video is its much easier to host it yourself. The other neat thing about open video is it can be transparently hosted anywhere by someone else. This is different from most flash video sites where the hosting system provides the flash player application and it encapsulates your video content. This make sites ugly with lots of different player skins as you mix and match videos from the web. With open video you just reference the video file directly and you control its representation. This also makes things like cross site in-browser video editing possible (see below). (Keep in mind just like images some site may prefer you don’t hot-link to the content)

But other sites encourage remote inline display like Archive.org. This means if your running tight on bandwidth there is no shortage of options and you don’t have to sacrifice your site theme, branding, or your visitors. For example simply upload your video to Archive.org and now plop it in a video tag and party with open video Other Ogg hosting sites include tinyVid.tv, videobin.org and most recently dailymotion. And if your video would be a good fit for a encyclopedia article some day then check out the long time free format supporter wikimedia commons

Editing One of the hardest pieces of the puzzle. First off you should know that iMovie and Final Cut Pro support ogg theora today with the installation of ogg quicktime component. Free software desktop editors are not always as mature as their proprietary counterparts But that is quickly changing with projects like PiTiVi and the blender video editor.

We are also working on an in-browser video editor with Kaltura as demoed at the Open Video Conference. (screen shot above) Its still relatively early but our ultimate goal is to bring the power of the open web platform (svg, canvas effects & css styled html) and the power of collaborative authoring (wikitext, wiki-templates) to rich media editing. If you running Firefox 3.5 and like checking out half working projects you can check out the editor here. You can report ideas to the talk page and if your a coder feel free to check out the source, (its of course all open source)

Entry Filed under: html5, mediaWiki, mv_embed, participatoryculture, theora, tools