Posts filed under 'tools'
January 30th, 2009
I’m happy to announce some improvements we’ve made in our capture architecture. We’ve spent the last couple months implementing our new capture and transcode system. We have cut out some unnecessary complexity and updated or replaced many of our core components. For instance, we’ve switched our OCR over to Google’s Tesseract and are getting a considerably higher hit rate reading names off the scree. This makes it easier for you to find speeches by a particular person.
We’ve also overhauled our methods for capturing and encoding closed caption text — our text metadata holds sync much better to video, even across those long 12hr debates. New streamlined work-flows have saved us several hours per day in transcode time, and now require less manual intervention. This means we can bring content online faster and more reliably with less work. And naturally, we’re using free software every step along the way.
There is a bit more to do to clean up nagging bugs (the crucial ones have been squished) and to document & generalize what we’ve done so that other archival projects can take advantage of it.
aphid
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
June 30th, 2007
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.
aphid
June 30th, 2007
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.
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
February 3rd, 2007
Update mv_embed.02 has been released its a bit more user friendly and has the latest cortado player.
In response to a request the mv_embed code has been packaged as a stand alone component. This should enable its usage on other sites that want to embed ogg theora clips without those annoying plug-in install requests from the browser that point to non-existing auto install systems.
Mv embed has been tested in windows on (IE 6 (activeX vlc) IE 6(java), Firefox 2(vlc plugin), Firefox 2(java), Opera(java) … on linux: Konqueror (java), firefox(java) … If people find other platforms or combinations that do not work let me know about & if it’s the script’s fault I will see what I can do 
Often we are limited by the java applet framework which has a few issues… As established in the FOMS meeting: we really need native ogg theora support in firefox & an IE compatible theora plugin.
Future features for mv_embed could include detection of the mplayer plugin (which I would recommend over the vlc browser plugin for linux users), generally enhance it to be more css style friendly, playhead control for vlc plugin (as demoed in tests here & on the vlc site) & maybe integrate the code as a plugin for various CMS and blogging software.
Also check out iTheora (French) project which performs a similar function to the mv_embed script.
dale
November 7th, 2006
In preparation for the open source media course that is happening tonight I built a vmware virtual appliance for running the powerful non-linear editor cinelerra in windows.
Now people stuck in windows land can take advantage of this most excellent video editing suite. Cinelerra features among many other things: Ogg Vorbis support! In other words you can edit the ogg theora files that we distribute here on metavid. To use this virtual appliance you will need the free vmware virtual machine player.
fedora-cinelerra-vm.rar (1.3GB), (save target as…we should have a torrent shortly). The root password is ‘thoughtpolice’, and user ‘cinelerra’ pass is ‘cinelerra’.
The image is a basic fedora 5 install fully updated, with cinelerra in the launch bar. It also has the vmware extensions installed but I recommend just mounting a windows network share in the vm as it seems to performs better than a “shared folder” for some reason.
dale
