Google has started accepting applications for Summer of Code 2009. We are encouraging folks to check out the Wikimedia and Xiph/Annodex organizations. This year, in addition to participating under those organizations, I am helping out in organizing the Xiph/Annodex summer of code participation. We are trying to get the word out to get as many high quality applicants as possible. If you walk in technical, academic and open media circles please help circulate our call for submissions:
Xiph.org/Annodex.net seeking Summer of Code student
applications!
2009 is an important year for free codecs: Ogg Vorbis on every Android device, Ogg Theora support in development for Mozilla Firefox 3.5, and expanded Ogg hosting by the Internet Archive and Wikimedia. Xiph.org and Annodex.net, who develop free codecs (Ogg Vorbis, Theora, Dirac, Speex, CELT, FLAC) and web video support for them, have been selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2009.
Students should feel free to select one of these, develop a variation, or propose their own ideas! Some examples:
Develop a conference bridge or reference SIP client for CELT, the
new, ultra-low delay audio codec that bridges the gap between Vorbis
and Speex for applications where both high quality audio and low delay
are desired. If you enjoy hacking on networks, you’ll have fun with
these CELT projects.
Develop components to support all Ogg codecs for OpenMAX IL, the
media plugins used in Maemo, Android and LIMO mobile devices. This
touches on many interesting projects, and is perfect for anyone with
an interest in mobile and embedded systems who wants a broad
introduction to multimedia codecs.
Write a JavaScript Library for Subtitles, Captions and other
time-aligned text. The main focus of this project is around enabling
video accessibility for Ogg in Firefox. The project requires a student
with experience in JavaScript development, HTML and CSS, but also with
some understanding of C for liboggplay and libkate, and of C++ for
Firefox.
Make a Proof of Concept for HTML5 Ogg Video support in the
Chromium Browser, using liboggplay (our Ogg Theora playback library,
as used in Mozilla Firefox). Full support for HTML5 <video> is a
lot of work, but let’s get the ball rolling with a proof of concept
for Theora frame decoding and rendering.
Add support for import and export of XSPF playlists to Songbird,
the Mozilla-powered open music player. This project requires good XML
foo, the opportunity to work with cross-platform XUL and JavaScript,
and perhaps some C++.
Interested students *must* get involved with the project development
community, on project mailing lists and IRC, before the application
deadline. When selecting projects, preference will be given to
students who have submitted at least one patch to a Xiph.org or
Annodex.net project before the application deadline.
Students will receive a grant from Google for successful work on their
GSoC projects. Hacking on free multimedia projects is fun and can have
a big impact. We need students who love to hack, to help put support
for free codecs into more applications, browsers and networks.
Along with a few other exciting features; Open Congress is now syndicating Metavid video! This is on the heels of Govtrack’s recent addition of Metavid feeds as well. Open Congress integration includes full support for Bills and People pages along with YouTube syndication. You can see the full scope at open congress:
Videos from Metavid, the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, and the YouTube hubs for the House and Senate. Now, for every Senator, Representative, and major bill in Congress, OpenCongress shows you embedded video footage of relevant floor speeches, official announcements, and more. It’s video, it’s awesome.
An example bill page (that has had a lot of tagging activity) is the economic stimulus bill.
At present, the #1 most discussed political clip on YouTube is a very short 16 second clip of Chuck Schumer claiming Americans don’t care about pork barrel spending.
The neat thing about Metavid is that because we archive the full day of proceedings, we can take that same 16 second clip and expand coverage from either side and provide context to an otherwise self-encapsulated sound byte. Here we can see Chuck’s quote as part of a larger rhetorical flourish; he calls for the removal of the pork spending and highlights what he sees are the important elements of the bill. Here is the the clip on Metavid:
The ability to dig deeper and investigate a given argument that is being presented is fundamental to understanding what is really taking place. This is why a citation framework for web video is so important for healthy deliberation. This way, the context (and contextualization) of a given source document can be investigated. Tools like Metavid open up this citation process for continued dialog in contrast to allowing the clip fragment to act as the final word.
Looks like the code to support ogg vorbis/theora playback has made its way into the nightly builds of firefox! This is a really great development! Mozilla’s has announced support for native theora support in ff 3.1. This will have a hugely positive effect on promoting free formats and ensuring current “non-free” formats stay cheep or free-as-in-beer. This is particularly bold of Mozilla in they are pioneering a “more free web” than the standards groups were able to agree on. As previously discussed some industry participation in the htm5 group discouraged a free baseline web video format citing submarine patent concerns. The power of the premier open source projects to ensure support of a free software ecosystem can not be overstated. Mozilla role here is hugely important and its great to see they have taken the right path to ensure the possibility of a bright future for free and open media.
Update: see Ginger’s excellent summary with historical contextualization, Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan’s Why Ogg Matters post, coverage on bush coder blog (the firefox video integration branch developer) and Greg Maxwell’s post (one of the key supporters of ogg media on wikipedia)
The Personal Democracy Forum conference is under way here in NY. A lot of really cool projects and talks I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In questioning the structure of current online political mobilization he highlighted the network capacity to build a new rather simply act in reaction to or attempt to open existing power structures. As an example Linus did not protest outside of Microsoft office for them to build a better OS, and Jimmy Wales did not throw stones at Britannica until they became more open. He points to new incorporations and ways to organize groups of people without rigid hierarchy or centralization.
In the context of video technologies there were some interesting projects as well. Remixamerica.org was showing their platform for remixing and promoting political videos using the open kaltura video editor. We will see about adding the metavid archive as a source for remixes Also mogulus was showing off their platform for realtime video broadcasting from a small portable nokia camara.
Steel this filmI and II have helped shape the debate on copyright policy. The first film focused on the raid against the pirate bay and file sharing culture. Part II took on the broader copyright debate.
Now they are making their interview footage from Steel This Film II available for remixing. Their site features ogg video with time segment requests (similar to what we do here on metavid) and synced transcripts for search. Footage is made available in ogg theora & high quality HDV via bittorrent. They encurge people to download and reuse the footage.
This exiting new area of community based audio video production is nearing actualization. Early projects like the digital tipping point and the echo chamber project did early experimenters with the concept. Now many web video startups are enabling communities to “remix” eachothers videos right in the browser. Projects such as Steel this Footage are pushing forward in existing ways as well. In the not to distant future hopefully MetaVidWiki will be among the strong enablers of community video production. By tying together temporal semantic audio/video metadata authoring and searching with a full featured video editor it should connect the dots of peer production with audio/video media assets. More on that in the near future
Also see coverage of steal this film from miro blog
This years NetSquared featured projects includes metavid along with 20 other proposed or in-development net mashups for social change. Featured project developers and social innovators will meet up in late may for the net squared conference. More from the site:
The NetSquared Conference, will be on May 27 and 28, 2008 in San Jose, CA. As in the past two years, the two-day event will bring together innovators in social benefit initiatives, business models, funding for philanthropic initiatives, software development, and technology to advance social change around the globe using social networks and social Web tools such as blogging, podcasting, and virtual communities.
As development continues for metavidWiki, I am continuing to release updates of the stand alone component mv_embed. Fresh from the Melbourne is the new release of mv_embed .6. You can check out some videos from the conferences I have been attending here: The FOMS free and open media proceedings and the multimedia talks at the linux Australia conference. (both published with the latest release of mv_embed)
Changes in .6 include:
added plug-in selection tool
added msg system for compatibility with translations
added support for safari
add support for relative file or path names for media files for cortado.
improved playlists usage
added “experimental” support for “sequences” and editing.
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
I will be presenting a position paper at the W3C video workshop next week. I will be joined by Silvia from annodex. We will push standardization around free formats. Our position papers have been posted on the w3 site. Here is an excerpt from my position paper:
Critical to making video a first class citizen on the web is extending the properties of other first class citizens like text and images as they apply to video. These properties should include:
Standardization around a freely implementable format. So both proprietary and free browsers can support playback and (eventually) encoding without licensing costs.
A standard open format for search engines and web services to access video metadata such as close captions, tags, chapter info etc.
Standard ways of transclusion/reference/embedding of video content. Additionally a standard url request scheme for retrieving segments of video streams is needed.
Use of existing http protocols for access and retrieval of video content.
Google has started accepting applications for Summer of Code 2009. We are encouraging folks to check out the Wikimedia and Xiph/Annodex organizations. This year, in addition to participating under those organizations, I am helping out in organizing the Xiph/Annodex summer of code participation. We are trying to get the word out to get as many high quality applicants as possible. If you walk in technical, academic and open media circles please help circulate our call for submissions:
Looks like the code to 
The 
I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book 
Engage Media has published a very 
I will be presenting a position paper at the