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.
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.
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
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)
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
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.
Its now clear that html5 is heading in a codec agnostic direction, thanks to “patent concerns” raised by Nokia and apple pushing forward with quicktime based video tag “support” in Safari 3.1. This of course makes it complicated for sites like wikipedia to count on the html5 video tag to support free media since apple is not going to make any attempts to support it on their own. This makes it slightly more complicated for us at metavid as well. (will have to do some more case detection with the mv_embed script).
What is not clear is mozilla’s long term strategy….
Proprietary media formats do best in proprietary media platforms. Free software does poorly when parts of the web are tied to proprietary platforms. Free software can flourish on an open web. From a purely business perspective anything Mozilla can do to promote a web that works well with free software will ultimately increase the vitality of free software platforms and ultimately increase firefox’s market share. Apple and Microsoft are certainly not going to pre-install mozilla as the default browser in their proprietary platforms.
But forces beyond mozilla’s control have made htm5 codec agnostic… What should mozilla do now?
They should take the sonbird approach and ship gstreamer across all platforms with native wrappers to direct show and quicktime to fall back on proprietary encoded content while ensuring baseline free codec and free media platform support. There are many reasons to go with an open community extensible free media platform, as outlined in the songbird blog…but let me mention a few more:
Going with a GPL based media platform ensures they will not be subordinate to the same proprietary platforms that they are competing with. Ie Mozilla will control the media platform user experience rather than the host operating system media platform which has its own browser to promote.
It ensures that the widely successful Firefox extension concept can be extended to the media platform in a cross platform friendly way. There is already a huge base of gstreamer plugins to build off of. Imagine a site that installs a simple client extension that enables transcoding from local high quality DV format directly into dirac or theora and uploading to the site… avoiding server side transcodes and associated quality loss. OR an extension that lets you do live brodcasts from your machine integrated with an associated web service or a full featured inbrowser video editor OR an extension that uses gstreamer to enable output to DVD iso from a collaboratively produced video sequence –these sort of killer apps can help propagate firefox.
Doing gstreamer cross platform will make it easy to support future free codecs such as dirac in one pass, instead writing and maintaining codec extensions for every codec for each propitiatory platform and trying to ensure the experience is identical across both proprietary and free platforms.
The code is already mostly written.
If Mozilla takes its own manifesto seriously hopefully they will be more forward thinking about the open media platform issue.
Engage Media has published a very detailed report on the state of Free and Open source software for online video. Titled: FOSS Codecs For Online Video: Usability Uptake and Development 1.2 the paper details many software application and tools for ~free~ online publishing of video. They even include a mention of mv_embed ;). Their recommendations for pushing for ogg theora in HTML5 and using FOSS whenever possible in Transmission members projects are positive directions for wider open source media wide adoption. check it out
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
Al Gore was on the Daily Show last night and had a good interview with Stewart. Gore criticizes the news/tv medium for its efforts to relate Congregational conversations to citizens. Television is a broken system that produces a one way conversation. Here is a snippet from the show.
Gore like others sees potential for improvement of these system of communication and governance via “The Internet”. In this respect Gore highlights the problems that we hope metavid will help address. Mainly making Congressional video more accessible and re-usable. We can imply by Gore criticism of television as a one way conversation that when he says “the Internet” he means the kind of Internet Lessig describes, a participatory read-write web. In software metaphors the existing television system is read only, closed source and proprietary. So if we aim to address this problem our social software design decisions should be informed by the ideals of free software and participatory culture. see metavid thesis
Gore goes on to say this Internet potential was not actualized in 2003. While true the� invasion, occupation and total devastation of Iraq was not prevented :(… more than a million people in the US and around 10 million people worldwide did hit the streets to try and stop it. This un-paralleled mass action was enabled in no small part by the improved social communication infrastructure. If we are to hail improvements in communication infrastructure as the savior of our democracy it would be good to highlight not only what “the media, the President, Congress, and CIA”, did wrong, but also what the people did right.
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.
I’m very pleased to announce that Metavid has been awarded a grant by Sunlight Foundation. This grant will fund full-time development on this project for a year in addition to expansion of hardware infrastructure. We’re very excited about what this means for the project: more stability, new features and better accessibility.
We’re happy to continue our cooperation with Sunlight, whose mission is, “to use the transformative power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparence and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.”
Watch this space for announcements of what we are (and will soon be) implementing.
Some interesting conversations have been taking place in the whatwg standards group as people set about to design the standards for the future web platform. Out of this discussion the video element has been proposed as a standard way of embedding video content into the page. Implementation details are being discussed such as css styles for video playback controls and annodex like temporal stream reference. But most of the discussion has centered around the video element and its single standard baseline codec that web developers can count on being supported if they use the new video element. As free software intermixes with the process of standardization proprietary solutions fall to wayside and free codecs/containers become the only broadly supportable solution.
Activity on the list grew earlier this month when Opera demoed embed ogg theora video in their browser. As the proposal gained traction the Apple folks chimed in. As to be expected Apple is not too keen on having theora be the baseline standard for web video.
In the old world of un-free software, each proprietary vendor would bundle their proprietary solution with the software they controlled. (IE bundled with windows media, safari with quicktime & now adobe apollo with flash video) Playback of each proprietary solution is “free” for playback and on tap for for anyone thats dirking as each company tries to wedge their proprietary solution into the web platform. If they are successful a prosperous future awaits in taxing all audio/video interactions online.
We may have sudo standards like flash video, but no proprietary component can become a native standard for a free browser. Likewise proprietary browsers eventually end up supporting free formats such as png as there is little to no cost to support these free-licensed formats and they must evolve with the web platform to maintain what little is left of their proprietary platform.
Because Firefox has experienced such phenomenal growth its influence carries over to other pieces of the web platform insuring that no one company can gain a proprietary wedge.
While it looks like an impossible project for ogg theora to go from close to zero adoption on the web to wide scale standardization that is exactly what will happen over the next few years.
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 
Engage Media has published a very 
Some interesting conversations have been taking place in the