A Call to 5min of Action for More Perfect Archive

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.

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Massive Metavid Updates

~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.

Existing developments with Kaltura and Wikimedia

Work is under way to write a ~simple reduced feature set~ smil like player & editor using firefox 3.1 html5 video support. Basic transitions using css animations and frame scrubbing/serving features have been completed… watch this space & kalturas blog for updates as development moves forward. As this development matures we should have an integrated sequencer on-par with kalturas flash based video editor but using ogg theora and accessible to Firefox users on free software platforms.

Metavid Launch Plan

We will be launching metavid over the next week or so. Watch this blog for updates As a community archive project users help in reporting any bugs they find with the site in #metavid on irc.freenode.net or emailing them in to the developers list

MediaWiki rc1 release notes:

Some minor known issues remain please send in bug reports as we move towards an official 1.0 release

Unified Search

• new unified search model groups and aggregates relevant semantic metadata per search
• advanced search improvements
• improved autocomplete suggestions/display

Stream Interface Enhancements

• new streamlined stream interface for easier clip editing and jumping around the stream
• improved transcript integration with video playback (scrolls transcript window while seeking and playing back content)

Improved Skinning Support

• improved skin infrastructure to support the skin created by the Participatory Culture Foundation

Mv_Embed (1.0.rc1)

• improved html5 -> current browsers/plugins support
• support multiple stream selection using html5 <source> tag or ROE media description xml, supports flash streams (Thanks to Summer of code Student *stjepan*)
• improved transcript scrolling, remote embedding without data proxy, metadata queries, and browser compatibility.
  
• improved video control skinning (should soon be possible to support multiple css based skins)
• developed php based flash media server added for serving segments of flvs to arbitrary clients.
  (based on FLV4PHP this lets you do server side media seeking similar to other php based falsh-media-servers except mvflvServer its compatible other playback clients like vlc and mplayer, works with flv files over 4 hours 39 min 37 seconds long and avoids sending the client keyframe metdata for quick streaming response)
• Also See Mv embed page

Massive security review (thanks to tstarling of wikimedia)

• properly escaped all values outputted to browser and database
• proper use of database wrapper functions
• closed some security holes (running older versions of metavidWiki is a bad idea please update now!)

Updated compatibility to JQuery 1.2.6

• updated to latest and greatest (faster, leaner etc)
• Also see jquery release notes
• started updating ui.jquery components

Updated compatibility to updated metavidWiki version 1.13

• Also see mediaWiki Release Notes

Updated Compatibility to updated Semantic MediaWiki 1.2+

• faster, lazy loading of all classes, better db structure, + lots more
• Also See Semantic MediaWiki release notes

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Some Features Updates

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

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MetaVidWiki Open Beta

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.

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Site Maintenance and MetaVidWiki

As you may have noticed there the site is undergoing maintenance as we transition to a new server and new wiki based software system. Feel to check out the MetaVidWiki site as seen in previous posted screen casts. We are in the process improving documentation and cleaning up the wiki for wider sharing next week. Right now editing is restricted but will be opened up shortly. The existing (old) metavid site will remain accessible

update: There are a few issues that we have run into as the site comes online. We are working hard on getting everything ready for the “general public”. Watch this blog (and others) for a site launch announcement, and feel free to report issues on the wiki

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MetavidWiki code now hosted on wikimedia

The metavidWiki svn has been relocated to wikimedia svn. This will enable tighter integration into the mediaWiki developer ecosystem. Enabling translations via excellent betawiki project, integrated bug tracking and friendly IRC bots reporting svn commits on #metavid

Development continues on metavidWiki and we hope to launch the mediaWiki extension with the congress video dataset within a few weeks. Keep on eye on this space for more updates

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Mv_Embed and Playlists Preview

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

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Wikimania 07

Wikimania 07 is upon us. I will be presenting the work in progress metavid mediaWiki extension. The abstract is as follows:

Metavid Wiki - Real Time Collaborative Semantic Audio/Video Metadata in MediaWiki. Metavid Wiki is the in development second iteration of the Metavid archive project (metavid.org). Metavid Wiki builds off of the MediaWiki code base, the semantic wiki extension and the first version of the metavid. Metavid Wiki employs a structured temporal name space with the wiki page model to enable dynamic, versioned metadata for arbitrary stream segments. Congressional data along with stream metadata is used to build a rich query space for stream segment search. These segments can then be recombined into versioned sequences and referenced internally or externally

update: for audio podcasts of the event check out wikipedia weekly

update:  slides are available here

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While the Congress is away…

The House and Senate are off this week for Independence Day observence; we’re using this break as an opportunity to break in our brand new admin interface, which makes the numerous behind-the-scenes tasks involved in transcoding and bringing the footage online much more streamlined. By the time Congress returns on the 9th, we expect to be caught up and able to get new footage online within a day or so of air — hopefully sooner.

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While the Congress is away…

The House and Senate are off this week for Independence Day observence; we’re using this break as an opportunity to break in our brand new admin interface, which makes the numerous behind-the-scenes tasks involved in transcoding and bringing the footage online much more streamlined. By the time Congress returns on the 9th, we expect to be caught up and able to get new footage online within a day or so of air — hopefully sooner.

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