Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
March 6th, 2009
As sometimes happens in responding to a comment I ended up witting a blog post 
The commenter hits on a common theme around ogg / open video.
As a producer of video for the web rather then a programmer I can only say: Ogg for me has no value other then its open. That is nice and great in itself but with no professional back-end infrastructure to produce high quality webvideos without thinking about it [snip] nobody is going backward just for openness.
I agree. The present state of open video tools for professional production leave much to be desired. But the present feeling of bending backwards to use open video is about to end. We are on the forefront of rapidly shifting ecosystem and a shift of what it means to be a professional video producer.
Until very recently we lacked the open foundation to move froward. With html5 video and high performance javascript engines we are rapidly removing these impediments to rapidly distributed innovation. In this context the same properties that allowed open tools to thrive for rich web content will propagate the video tool chain and the concept of video producer will fundamentally change.
The essential quality of open source software (OSS) is its capacity to generates infinite customization and “remixing”. This is unparalleled by conventional proprietary services that can only near this flexibility with rich APIs. Proprietary web CMS’s are a waste of time for the professional use context in comparison to open ones even if the proprietary ones are “free” and more “feature rich” at first glance.
This has already manifested in the blogging space. There very few professorial bloggers using hosted blogging sites, rather they use open source software. It is the professional usage that thrives on the open platform since bloggers are not just using a static piece of software to author a static consumable media. They are providing a context of engagement for participants and need to have customization control over that context to differentiate. The cheapest; best way to do that is leverage open source software.
We are just about hitting that tipping point for video. Professional video producers of the near future are context providers; not movie producers in the traditional sense. Here OSS is essential for individuals, small groups and even larger organizations to minimize costs in producing a differentiable context of engagement.
What about Flash?
Even with flash we see the success of flowplayer, and the company I work with Kaltura in providing “open source” customizable flash solutions. But being integrated into the web frameworks without a proprietary wedge will greatly accelerate this process. There are many subtle consequences of this proprietary wedge that greatly limit web videos potential:
Some are hidden costs like many dollars in license costs web distributors could be facing as the h.264 Internet distribution licensing grace period ends next year.
Other limitations are architectural limitations… for example ogg / annodex video tool chain for a few years has included a temporal uri framework for timed media. This makes archival interoperability and url editing remix video possible … something that has traditionally been difficult with flash video. Not because its impossible technically but because Adobe sells communication server that “lets you” serve arbitrary pieces of flash video. With ogg its open on both ends so if we want to serve sub-key-frame accurate video with temporal urls then its no problem. In flash its not so easy. (not that efforts of projects such as red5 should not be appreicated)
I could go through a few other examples but I will save that for my why ogg/html5 is better than flv/flash & why you should “switch” post
dale
February 4th, 2009
We have two user guides available on the wiki. [Help:Usage_Quickstart] covers basic usage of the site — how to search and use the stream interface. [Help:Participation_Quickstart] is a good introduction to bill and category tagging.
As I’ve passed these guides around to some colleagues looking for feedback (yours is appreciated as well, naturally), I’ve been asked a few times, “Why is ‘peanut butter’ used in so many of your examples?” It’s actually a long answer which contains a key bit of Metavid’s history/mythology. I’ll explain after the fold.
[Disclaimer: Appologies on video quality of below clips. They're literally from the first week of us capturing content, are low quality oggs that break our naming convention. They may not work well 
]
Our experience searching for peanut butter dates back to well before the latest salmonella outbreak to the first week we began capturing video as part of the Metavid project. For background, I’ll set the scene: it was November, 2005 — after spending most of the summer working on our capture architecture, we’d finally settled on using ivtv, since it gave us the most flexibility in terms of access to VBI data and standards compliant output (we’d recently jettisonned mythtv).
We began capturing during the last week of debates in 2005, before the holiday recess, motivated by the idea that this footage wasn’t accessible enough. Getting it online in a (re)usable format was our main goal. However, once we had a about a week of it was already clear that it was almost unwatchable. Every day in both chambers of congress starts with an opening prayer followed by the pledge of allegience and, in most cases, hours of procedural nonsense. Even among only a few hundred hours, it was difficult to hone in on an important speech.
We quickly deployed Annodex using the closed caption feed as a search vector and sent links around to our friends. My longtime friend Ray Robinson found and quickly IM’d me a search with some results that we’ve been using ever since to illustrate the break this technology has made from traditional ways of watching video — peanut butter (he also found etch-a-sketch — I’m going to stick with the peanut one for now and leave the rhetorical use of toys in congress for another rant).
“Peanut butter” occurs a few times over the course of several days, beginning with the following clip:
Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argues that stripping illegal combatants at Guantanamo Bay of the writ of Habeas Corpus will clog American courts, using the example of an Arizona prisoner who sued using a Habeas plea over the eternal debate of ‘crunchy’ vs ‘creamy’ peanut butter (I’ve just spent a bit googling around and could only find this case.
“PB” next occurs later that day, in a rebuttal by Jeff Bingaman (D-NM):
And then again four days later:
The bill passed, and was later undone by Congress and the Supreme Court (a detailed summary of Habeas in War on Terror). Since then, peanut butter has come up a few times in the contexts you’d expect: agriculture and food safety. But it was this early exchange that illustrated how the convergence of emerging open technologies (open source video, indexed searching, metadata management) was enabling new ways of understanding this base of knowledge. Rather than experiencing congressional video a single linear event: Opening Prayer, Pledge, One Minute Speeches, we gain access to patterns of discourse over time. Furthermore, you can get to these intense debates, skipping past all the procedural jargon by searching for food.
Bon Appetit! We’ll be featuring some more food related clips over the next recess.
aphid
April 4th, 2008
The LiVE show at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine features metavid in the shows collection. The pieces explored the meaning of “live” in the context of heavy mediation of day-to-day interactions. Karen Finley piece, titled “business as usual” highlighted a constant stream of deaths as a consequence of US aggression in the Iraqi region via unattended computers constantly printing out large stacks of the names of people killed in the conflict. MTAA & RSG’s Want consists of 900 video clips in which individuals declare something that they desire, which are then triggered by search requests from a peer-to-peer network. More information about all the pieces is on the site.
dale
July 10th, 2006
A new feature is now available that facilitates the remote embedding of metavid or other ogg theora /annodex content within webpages. featured in this article post is a clip from metavid:
check out the external embed page in the wiki for implementation details. Will be interesting to see how this new feature gets used Either leave comments here or in the wiki page to request new features, complain, or let us know how it’s being used.
dale
April 21st, 2006
Here are some relatively short answers to what metavid is about.
Metaivd addresses the problem of undemocratic systems of engagement with political proceedings. We argue that in commercial content production there is an inherently undemocratic assumption in which there are “producers†of information and “consumers†of information.
In commercial television for example political proceedings are mediated by the selection of news segments, the editorializing of the content, the news tickers, the choice of subject matter, the advertisements etc. These mediations predominately reflect the point of view of the concentrated power which produces them and is therefore undemocratic. The production is packaged in compiled form as an authoritative product which is made un-questionable by the culture of consumption and Intellectual Property laws which forbids the reuse or re-contextualization of this content.
Metavid in contrast makes the assumption that everyone is a participant. In Metavid all the mediations built with or in the system are open source. You can change the in and out points on the segments your presented with, you can view source on the ticker and change the sources of information from which it draws its titles. You can re-mediate or re-negotiate anything before you including the metavid system itself which is also open source, built on top of other open source applications. This operates within a culture of participation, and rather then focusing on the first creator leverages the potential for creation in everyone.
We feel this begins to addresses the problem of undemocratic systems of engagement by providing liberalized alternative context for engagement. Building off of the work of innovative participatory cultural systems such as wikipeidia, metavid makes the full archive of participation, meta data, and public domain content freely available for re-appropriation as long as you do not restrict the freedom of others to do the same.
And finally some relevant quotes:
“What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce others to produce, and second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is readers or spectators into collaborators†Benjamin, Author as Producer
“If its correct as I believe it is that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work or creative inquiry for free-creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions then of course it will fallow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.†Noam Chomsky
dale
January 13th, 2006
This is a test post to make sure this works. Watch this space and we’ll have some project updates in no time.
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