Posts filed under 'mediaWiki'
October 9th, 2008
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.
dale
September 18th, 2008
~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
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
dale
July 25th, 2008
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
dale
July 17th, 2008
wikimania 2008 is under way here in Alexandria, Egypt. Lots of good talks, and its quite warm Although not as hot here in Alexandria as it was in Cairo… anyway… here are the slides (ppt, odp) for the presentation i will give tomorrow. As with last year wikipedia weekly is providing coverage of the event.
This is the 3rd wikimania that metavid has been represented, 2006 in Boston and 2007 in Taipei were also featured on this blog
dale
June 18th, 2008
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.
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 19th, 2008
Google Summer of Code 08 will start accepting applications Monday, March 24, 2008. I have submitted a few metavid related project ideas under the xiph and wikipedia foundation organizations and offered to mentor them.
Google’s Summer of Code is a great program, as a student in summer of code 06 I worked on early video integration for mediaWiki. It was a positive experience and got me more involved with free/open source software. If your a student interested in open media I recommend you take a look at the many great project ideas for xiph foundation. There are lots of other great projects and organizations to work with as well.
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
January 9th, 2008
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
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
Previous Posts
