“OpenMeetings.org is a audio/video transcription and annotation platform built from entirely free and open source software. Launched in June 2009 and inspired by MetaVid (metavid.org), the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, OpenMeetings.org hosts and welcomes submission of conference recordings and formal proceedings. Project goals are to increase availability, discoverability, and liberty to comment on archived meetings as to improve the degree of informed civil discourse across a broad range of social issues.”

I encourage people to check out the site
Here is a video of Geroge talking about the site at a recent Kaltura developer meet-up.

Technology Review on Open Video

David Talbot from Technology Review has put together a good article on Open Video. Building off of the Open Video Alliance event he pieces together a lot of threads of the open video movement. The article opens with early work that we did on metavid project and goes on to highlight the efforts of Mozilla, Xiph, Wikimeida, Kaltura and others in promoting open video on the web.

I recommend people check out the video discussion by Jonathan McIntosh and Julie Levin Russo on the difficulties of working with proprietary formats when the system for media distribution is designed for “consuming”. Open video has the potential to disrupt this view only or walled garden with some embedding windows structure of web video and open it up for new interesting forms of participation.

wikimania 2009

On that note back to preparing the talk ( & ..cough.. cough .. software) for this years Wikimania event happening this week in Buenos Aires. Similarly to previous years, I look forward towards engaging with participants around the potential of open video in the worlds premier collaborative authoring environment With the difference being this year we are getting really close to to starting to deploy these components.

Apps for America is a special contest we’re putting on this year to celebrate the release of Data.gov! We’re doing it alongside Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb and the winners will be announced at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Washington, DC at the end of the Summer.

Also wanted to mention Kaltura ( the company that I am working with on wikimedia on open video stuff ) has a contest too. As part of their community edition launch they are giving away a few prizes for developers using the kaltura open video platform:

As part of the public launch of Kaltura Community Edition and the Kaltura.org community website, we’re calling existing members of the community and new developers to take part in a cool contest and win some fun prizes!

open video alliance logo

The Open Video Alliance conference put on by the Participatory Culture Foundation and Kaltura that took place recently in New York was a great success! One of the central themes was how we can build a better web with open video technologies.

Mozilla made a call to action to the web video community and has since launched the latest version of their open source browser Firefox 3.5. With this launch the percentage of the web that has integrated native support for ogg video has been steady increasing. As the free format vs proprietary format wars start heating up I wanted to highlight some tools and recent updated features that can help you help the Internet.

These tools are principally possible because of the hard work xiph.org hackers who very early on saw the need for an open media formats. These web open video tools are part of our open video efforts at wikimedia in collaboration with Kaltura, Mozilla and other people just like you ;). And of-course we use these tools here on metavid.org

I will quickly cover solutions for easy encoding, embedding & hosing.

Update: Also see the xiph.org page on html5 video
Also see Silvia’s round up of javascript libraries for embedding <video>

Encoding: As mentioned earlier Firefogg is in-browser extension to let you encode to ogg theora with the latest and greatest theora encoder. It features an easy to use api to integrate it into your site. You can also encode to a local file. Simply point your browser at firefogg.org grab the extension and start making ogg video today! If you prefer to have your video transcoded by some hosting service see below.

Embedding: The problem with using the video tag with free formats has always been browser adoption. You want to create a better Internet but don’t want to lose visitors or get complaints about not being able to play the video on your site. Fortunately many people have come up many excellent solutions to the problem. I will quickly highlight the mv_embed solution. The idea is simple:

Browsers without native ogg support now get a link to download browser with native support. (basic playback is supported via cortado or a plugin if they don't have Firefox)

Add the following javascript (or copy it to your server its all open source code)

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://metavid.org/w/js2/mwEmbed/mv_embed.js"></script>

then in your page freely use the video tag.

<video src="mymovie.ogg" poster="myposter.jpg" >

Pretty simple The video is rewritten and it support playback in IE6-8, old version of firefox and safari (if the users has java or some video plugin like VLC) You can also use it with flash video fallback if you want to minimally inconvenience your user, but I recommend sticking to only ogg formats now that Firefox 3.5 is out.

But wait.. thats not all…

It lets you build a consistent interface across underlining plugins and is themeable using jquery ui.

It also supports exposing remote embedding, download links and linkbacks making it easy to share the video.

Hosting The neat thing about  open video is its much easier to host it yourself. The other neat thing about open video is it can be transparently hosted anywhere by someone else. This is different from most flash video sites where the hosting system provides the flash player application and it encapsulates your video content. This make sites ugly with lots of different player skins as you mix and match videos from the web. With open video you just reference the video file directly and you control its representation. This also makes things like cross site in-browser video editing possible (see below). (Keep in mind just like images some site may prefer you don’t hot-link to the content)

But other sites encourage remote inline display like Archive.org. This means if your running tight on bandwidth there is no shortage of options and you don’t have to sacrifice your site theme, branding, or your visitors. For example simply upload your video to Archive.org and now plop it in a video tag and party with open video Other Ogg hosting sites include tinyVid.tv, videobin.org and most recently dailymotion. And if your video would be a good fit for a encyclopedia article some day then check out the long time free format supporter wikimedia commons

Editing One of the hardest pieces of the puzzle. First off you should know that iMovie and Final Cut Pro support ogg theora today with the installation of ogg quicktime component. Free software desktop editors are not always as mature as their proprietary counterparts But that is quickly changing with projects like PiTiVi and the blender video editor.

in browser video editing ... coming to a html5 browser near you ;)

We are also working on an in-browser video editor with Kaltura as demoed at the Open Video Conference. (screen shot above) Its still relatively early but our ultimate goal is to bring the power of the open web platform (svg, canvas effects & css styled html) and the power of collaborative authoring (wikitext, wiki-templates) to rich media editing. If you running Firefox 3.5 and like checking out half working projects you can check out the editor here. You can report ideas to the talk page and if your a coder feel free to check out the source, (its of course all open source)

We use categories for a few different kinds of content. Some occur every day, like One Minute Speeches in the House. Others only occur once a year, like San Jacinto Day or Earth Day. Some will be limited to a particular debate, like Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and others will be relevant to any topic such as Great Poster. There are small categories like Global Warming Skepticism and huge categories like Opening Prayer; serious ones, like Remembrances and light-hearted ones like Quiet Please.

One quality nearly every category shares is incompleteness — because there is so much content (over 3000 hours) and only a few of us tagging content, many categories are missing important content. As you watch speeches on Metavid, spending the extra 5 seconds to categorize them will make them easier to find in the future. If there’s a category you find interesting or appealing, feel free to expand it yourself. If you find a speech and there’s isn’t a category that makes sense for it — start a new one!

Check out this tutorial for more information about tagging clips. You can find a list of current media categories here.

This post is cross posted on wikimedia tech blog

Basic Feature Overview:

add media wizard

The Add Media Wizard adds a little “add media” button to every edit page letting you open up media search system to inject images and movie clips into your page. Presently the media search system searches commons, archive.org and metavid.org. (note archive.org inserts are not yet working because of a redirect bug we should have that fixed soon).

firefog logo

Firefogg is the really cool extension that everyone using open video on the web should know about! It packages ffmpeg2theora transcoder letting web sites trigger clients uploads of videos from whatever local format they have. Once you have enabled the add media wizard the site upload form gets a little use Firefogg button. Which you can use to enable the transcoder.

You may also want to see Brianna’s blog post made early this year about these media features. Stay tuned for wider gadget deployment … if your can’t wait you can always add

importScriptURI('http://metavid.org/w/js2/remoteMwEmbed.js');

to your User:UserName/monobook.js page. (this will enable firefogg uploads… but we have not yet enabled copy by url uploads on the other sites so you can’t import resources from archive sites yet)

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.

We are actively seeking student projects for Summer of Code. A list of project suggestions is at:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/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++.

Submissions

The student application period starts on Monday (March 23):
http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/timeline
and runs for a little under 2 weeks, until Friday April 3.

Details of our application process are at:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code_Applications

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.

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

opencongress.org

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.

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:

Furthermore we can expand to see Schumer’s entire speech on Metavid: And even the full day of debate.

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.

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.

• The swearing in of the 111th Congress
• A joint session counting electoral votes from the 2008 Presidential Election.
• Farewells to Ken Salazar in the senate, as he leaves to be Secretary of the Interior
• A somewhat heated exchange between Reps. Ted Poe and Barney Frank over the financial stimulus.

And my personal favorite of the month, an especially raucous &celebratory House Session from just before Obama’s inauguration on the 20th:

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.