Posts filed under 'coding'
March 27th, 2009
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/extensions/MetavidWiki/skins/add_media_wizard.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)
dale
January 30th, 2009
I’m happy to announce some improvements we’ve made in our capture architecture. We’ve spent the last couple months implementing our new capture and transcode system. We have cut out some unnecessary complexity and updated or replaced many of our core components. For instance, we’ve switched our OCR over to Google’s Tesseract and are getting a considerably higher hit rate reading names off the scree. This makes it easier for you to find speeches by a particular person.
We’ve also overhauled our methods for capturing and encoding closed caption text — our text metadata holds sync much better to video, even across those long 12hr debates. New streamlined work-flows have saved us several hours per day in transcode time, and now require less manual intervention. This means we can bring content online faster and more reliably with less work. And naturally, we’re using free software every step along the way.
There is a bit more to do to clean up nagging bugs (the crucial ones have been squished) and to document & generalize what we’ve done so that other archival projects can take advantage of it.
aphid
January 20th, 2009
FOMS 2009
Here is a summary of FOMS 2009 discussions and developments that I see are applicable to collaborative media on Wikimedia’s sites.
FOMS 2009 included a lot good discussion and hacking. As with previous years the meeting included the establishment of Community Goals
Several Projects are of interest to the future of collaborative media on Wikimeida.
Software Patents
As you may remember last December Nokia raised some “patten issues” to get the free format ogg theora tossed out of the html5 spec. While this failed to stop firefox from shipping ogg it has slowed down Opera and given Apple a reason not to ship Theora support. OpenMediaNow.org is project attempting to take on patent issues around enabling media in free software in a legally conforming way. They aim to encourage developers and companies to publish research around open codecs and group together legal resources to confront this issue.
Client Encoding
As mentioned on wikitech-l, firefogg is a really great solution for uploading theora media to websites from within the web browser. You simply point it at your high quality HD or DV footage and it transcodes to theora from settings supplied by the web service and uploads (in this case commons). Some new features for firefogg where discussed including resumable uploads.
Server Side Flattening of Sequences & Video editor
The current state of PiTiVi the open source gstreamer based video editor was presented. PiTiVi has been a 5 year effort Edward Hervey that has some very nice distinguishing qualities over the other open source video editor efforts. Most importantly its a extremely modular gNonLib / gstreamer core. (allowing it to easily tie into the massive collection of gstreamer plugins). PiTiVi’s is written in python and its interface is optional. We discussed how it could serve as a server side flattener for video collaboratively created on Wikipedia. This way you could save a sequence to a DVD or play back the flattened sequence with the java applet or a video plugin (just like video files are currently supported on Wikipedia).
Oggz_Chop
The current state of oggz_chop was reviewed and a model for highly scalable, accurate media seeking and playing via integrated open protocol for client side (liboggplay, firefox) and server side ( oggz_chop) ogg serving. Essentially oggz_chop provides headers for Firefox so it can request two resources one small oggz_chop generated resource ogg header and other being a normal http byte range request for the video payload. This will work well with proxies that already support http ranged requests. If your client does not send headers saying it support this model you will continue to get a single resource so things like wget myvideo.ogg?t=start&end will still work 
Bright Future for Open Media Scaling Up & Support for Dirac
Diracsupport was also discussed. Unlike the many years of efforts to get theora out into the media ecosystem we will likely be able to push Dirac out a _lot_ faster. This is because free code libraries are now powering media for popular web browser. We discussed adding Dirac support to both Firefogg (the in browser transcoder) and liboggplay (in library for supporting media playback in Firefox). Both efforts are relatively far along as ffmpeg2dirac already exists and some patches for liboggplay are on the way
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
dale
March 13th, 2008
We are pleased to announce that MetaVidWiki (link) is now in open beta. We look forward to you comments, suggestions, and bug reports on this new free platform for community audio video participation.
We have put together a new extended screen cast demoing MetaVidWiki features available here on metavid. (also available on google video, and xvid copy here (23 megs) ). Editing on MetaVidWiki site is now open to anyone that can pass a audio or visual captcha test…
So check out the demo video, try some searches, and then try improving the archive by syncing a transcript or improving some text content
Simultaneously we are releasing the software that powers metavid: MetaVidWiki extension (v.01). It has been packaged and released for other cool re-uses of the code base. The Mv_Embed package has been updated to version .7 and released as well.
Read on for Technical Feature overview:
MetaVidWiki extension (project page)
dependencies: MediaWiki, mod_annodex or oggz-chop, LAMP stack
recommend: the Semantic MediaWiki Extension.
- Adds namespaces for Streams, temporal stream metadata, and sequences.
- Adds interfaces for editing multiple sub-name-spaces of temporal metadata per Stream or layers. Enabling the separation of transcript languages, annotative layers or the defining of other layer types.
- Adds a media search engine based on page semantic properties and defined layer types.
- Extends Categories, Page Histories, and Semantic result sets with inline video playback.
- Adds an in-browser sequencer for editing and creating sequences from clip segments.
- Exports to video rss for categories & searches. Exports CMML for temporal metadata.
Specifically for the legislative archive:
- Auto-completes media searches with likely people, bills, issue groups or full text search.
- massive data scrape from open secrets, maplight, govtrack, and others to populate base data set.
- template based display of people, bills, & interest groups (separating data from display while remaining flexible with user contributed structured data)
Mv_Embed (full feature list)
- Is a stand alone javascript library used for video playback in MetaVidWiki
- Abstracts all ogg plugins to a near html5 spec, letting web developers target a single abstraction for multiple underlining plugin or native video support systems.
- Supports draft ROE (Rich Open multitrack media Encapsulation) spec for xml distribution of media.
- Supports playlists in xiph xspf , rss or inline format.
dale
December 18th, 2007
Updated screen-cast available here
you can grab the original xvid/mpeg4 clip (37.9 MB) and if all else fails its posted on youtube
As we work hard towards release candidates of the metavid Wiki extension and the official launch of the metavid congress archive project I thought I would quickly share a little preview of what we are up to. Its a very rough screencast my apologizes for the low volume and rough ending. We will make better screencasts to help with documentation and promotion of features in the future
About MetavidWiki Extension
MetavidWiki is an open source extension to mediaWiki (the software that runs wikipedia) it also builds off of the semantic mediawiki extension. All the video is encoded with ogg theora (the open source patent unencumbered video codec) and the dynamic video segmentation and metadata export is handled by annodex. Many of components are modular and reusable outside of mediaWiki such as mv_embed and the sequencer.
Once the site is launched you will be able to play with these tools directly! If you can’t wait come by #metavid on freenode and I will likely share our development server url with you … but expect to be recruited into documenting bugs
dale
September 26th, 2007
Here is a short demo (ogg 5 meg, mp4 17megs) video of the metavid wiki integration that has been under development. This video shows the stream view with basic editing of text and person attribute meta data. This is more or less what I demoed at wikipedia a while back. The in-development version of metavid wiki has 2 additional interfaces. One for searching streams metadata and another for creating and editing sequences. As was mentioned last week, the sequence playback functionality will be handled by mv_embed.
We hope to have something online that people can play with soon and then a total site conversion not long after that. To get a feel for how sequencing and “dynamic” searching will look/feel you can check out the original version of metavid… and then imagine in the mediaWiki platform ;P
dale
September 7th, 2007
The latest version of mv_embed has just been updated for preview before it goes live later next week
If your not familiar with mv_embed you can read the html5 the future is now post I made a while back. This playlist functionality will be the basis for viewing collaborative sequences created in Metavid-mediaWiki. In the mean time it will be another view for search results. Once a few IE bugs are fixed it will go live on the metavid site. If you have firefox you can check out the demo page now New features of this mv_embed release include:
Playlists: mv_embed now supports playlists. Supports xiph, m3u & ipod video rss (so far). It takes these types and gives a little interface for playback. It uses the plugins native playlist support or has the user manually advance the track if using a reduced feature set playback method.
Smaller Base Library: The code base has been re-factored to dynamically load required libraries and reduce the overall size of a given usage of mv_embed. Client plugin objects are now separate files loading only the code needed for a given client playback method. Ofcourse further optimization can be made with one of the javascript compression packages out there and I still have to do general code refactoring to fully take advantage of the jQuery library.
Oggplay: Great work is getting done on oggplay plugin. The latest mv_embed supports this client side playback method with playhead and all. This is will eventually be the preferred playback method.
VLC: The vlc plugin has received a few updates as well.
and lots of little changes see the mv_embed page for details
dale
September 5th, 2007
Thought I would send out a quick update of some open media happenings:
Super Open Media Platform: Everyone should check out Chris Doubles SVG + firefox3 video element demo. Similar to a silverlight demo for rotating still images, this demo takes the next step and swaps in ogg video inside SVG elements. This is done in an entirely free software and is patent unencumbered (for example notice the “we cant redistribute this edition” quote here in open source silverlight video implementations)
FOMS 2008: Building on the success of FOMS 2007 free & open source software developers will again converge in January to iron out the stumbling blocks to wide scale free-media adoption. Check out FOMS 2008
Miro road to 1.0: Miro previously known as Democracy Player is quickly nearing 1.0. Check out the latest feature set and get ready for the official release
dale
May 6th, 2007
While blog activity has been light the past few weeks, rest assured there has been good deal of svn activity I thought I would quickly share what I have been up to lately, and the targeted feature set for what we can call metavid 2.0
Metavid 2.0 is basically a complete code refactoring and extension of metavids feature set into the mediaWiki framework. (the software that runs every ones favorite encyclopedia). For a more details, read the rest of this blog entry and the targeted feature set on Metavid 2.0 wiki page
Beyond improved usability, scalability, accessibility and content/browser neutrality this rewrite aims to integrate metavid components with mediaWiki & the semantic mediWiki extension. The semantic wiki integration in particular will open up metadata queries to a more human readable format and un-bounded them from exiting indexed relations. Adding to Erik’s post about the future of wikipedia articles we can explain these features as extending the concepts of semantic data feeds on articles to video.
Metavid can already take a custom advanced search using our pre-defined indexed values mainly who said what when, and then use that as a video feed for democracy player or your ipod… But with the new system these advanced searches could be based on custom semantic data. ie a user could request a video sequence representing anytime anyone mentions word X that has received contributions more than Y from company Z. Or any variation there of. These realtime feeds will be the basic building blocks for open source news broadcasts that integrate rich video temporal metadata with up to the minute video broadcasts. Watch this space for more updates as its developed.
dale
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