Posts filed under 'related'
July 30th, 2008
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)
dale
June 23rd, 2008
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.
I will be giving a short demo of Metavid Tuesday afternoon.
dale
June 3rd, 2008
Steel this film I 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
dale
March 27th, 2008
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.
dale
January 29th, 2008
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.
dale
December 2nd, 2007
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
dale
December 2nd, 2007
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.
dale
September 11th, 2007
Following the liberalization of their copyright policy earlier this year C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!
update see also the sunlight post, and notice the link back in list-by-day descriptions here on metavid
This is a big step, providing a slew of additional timed “metadata†(bill data, index to congressional record) that we can use to enrich the metavid archive. The C-SPAN site is using the Congressional Record with archivists manually syncing up the record with the daily proceeding at per speaker granularity.[1] The closed caption based search which Metavid uses allows people to zero in on matching sections of video quicker but the official record is generally more accurate. Using both should greatly enhance the metavid search functionality and may help illuminate the revision and extension of remarks that congress people are always taking about.
The video C-SPAN is providing doesn’t currently integrate well into the blogging conversation – there doesn’t appear to be any way to embed it into a blog post. While the footage quality is a big step up from the 120×160 used on the main C-SPAN site, there doesn’t appear to be any broadcast resolution footage immediately available (except if you pay through the nose that their archive/store). Also it seems C-SPAN is in the early stages of populating their content as not all the video is available online yet. The metadata on Congressional Chronicle does not currently appear to be made available in a easily [re]usable format. We’d like C-SPAN to directly make it available in XML, but if nothing else the data can be scraped from the current site and then secondarily made available in XML.
This is a very exciting step forward from C-SPAN. We hope this progress will continue with C-SPAN making all their government coverage source mpeg2 files directly available like the mpeg2s metavid has been posting to archive.org. And we hope they expand the Congressional Chronicle archive to include all of the committee video and metadata. This will allow Metavid and other video projects to focus more on high level functionality such as tagging, collaborative video remixing, advanced search, representative/issue syndication etc.
dale
March 31st, 2007
From the DemocracyTV blog:
There’s a new version of XiphQT, which is the behind-the-scenes code that helps Democracy Player for OSX play Ogg files. We’ll be including this in an upcoming release of ours and it should make Ogg playback much more efficient. If you use the XiphQT plugin yourself, this version supports creation of Oggs, which is very handy.
This theora support means that the RSS feeds generated by MetaVid searches (those funny orange boxes: 
) are exportable as channels for your DTV player. You could use a channel for your own Congressman (here’s mine), an issue you care about (like peanut butter), or some combination of the two (Anna Eshoo saying Peanut Butter). The great thing about RSS and DTV is that as new matches to these searches occur, the clips will download automatically — giving you a new and efficient way to sousveil your representative and cause.
update: hmm, it looks like our feeds are broken in the latest democracyPlayer; we’re looking in to why.
aphid
March 7th, 2007
Today, C-SPAN has stepped into the digital age and announced the liberalization of their copyright policy. Now online bloggers, citizen journalists, and anyone with something to say about their representative can post any federally sponsored event covered by C-SPAN online without fear of copyright reprisals.
From C-SPAN.org:
C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency– about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks–which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.
This is very good news for all online users of C-SPAN videos. These efforts to modernize their copyright policy should be applauded! Metavid can now focus more more the application layer, building interesting interfaces for remixing, contextualizing & participating with the audio video media assets of our government. The other great news about this announcement is that metavid can begin to capture and make available all of the committee footage broadcasted on C-SPAN in high quality ogg theora
We will also of course continue are work towards capturing committees footage as broadcasted by the goverment through webcasts to simultaneously make a public domain version available whenever possible. This insures the maximum freedom for participants interested in re-using this footage. The House and Senate floor footage ofcourse is public domain and not subject to C-SPAN‘ creative commons like license. As mentioned in a previous post Carl has made some great progress in the area of posting committee footage online.
dale
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