The Attack Against Ogg Theora or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Proprietary Web

Leading up to the w3c video meeting tomorrow there has been a flurry of activity on slashdot and elsewhere, focusing on nokia resistance to a key component of the html5 video spec stating that video tag “should support Ogg Theora”. This key piece of the html spec has been removed from the latest draft. With proprietary web beneficiaries recommending a codec agnostic approach to the html5 video tag they would have us all stop worrying and love the proprietary web. Fortunately a lot of us think otherwise. Here is a short essay responding to some of the arguments against having the w3c recommend the theora codec.

Update: Check out Xiph’s press release, Digital Citizen’s “who benefits” essay, bluish coders comments (the theora for ff developer), about baseline video codecs and html5 by ginger of annodex & finally: the html 5 wars and why you should avoid them by spread open media

(more…)

2 comments by dale

Open Government Meeting

Carl Malamud & Tim O’Reilly hosted an open government meeting in Sebastopol CA which was very productive. Principals of Open Government Data were established and strategies for pushing openness in the current government data environment where shared. Metavid Wiki was presented in the short demos section of the meeting.
From the announcement:

This weekend, 30 open government advocates gathered to develop a set of principles of open government data. The meeting, held in Sebastopol, California, was designed to develop a more robust understanding of why open government data is essential to democracy.

(more…)

Add comment by dale

EngageMedia: FOSS Codecs For Online Video

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

1 comment by dale

W3C Video on the Web Workshop

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.

Add comment by dale

Metavid Wiki video preview

Here is a short demo (ogg 5 meg, mp4 17megs) video of the metavid wiki integration that has been under development. This video shows the stream view with basic editing of text and person attribute meta data. This is more or less what I demoed at wikipedia a while back. The in-development version of metavid wiki has 2 additional interfaces. One for searching streams metadata and another for creating and editing sequences. As was mentioned last week, the sequence playback functionality will be handled by mv_embed.

(more…)

4 comments by dale

mv_embed for MediaWiki

I hacked out a simple mediaWiki extension to use the mv_embed script. Its identical to the html based mv_embed except that description text is parsed as wiki text instead of html and it resolves file names for wiki video/image titles. This allows mediaWiki to easily include inline or external playlists. Having the playlist inline facilitates basic versioned sequence building. For now mod_annodex is need for segmentation, but I am working on a native php script that should allow easy integration of ogg segmentation wherever php is supported. Drag and drop sequences is also being working on in the metavid medaWiki extension but is still a few weeks away from public demoing. Watch for a screen capture post in the near future

(more…)

Add comment by dale

C-SPAN Posting Clips Online.

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

(more…)

Add comment by dale

Mv_Embed and Playlists Preview

The latest version of mv_embed has just been updated for preview before it goes live later next week

If your not familiar with mv_embed you can read the html5 the future is now post I made a while back. This playlist functionality will be the basis for viewing collaborative sequences created in Metavid-mediaWiki. In the mean time it will be another view for search results. Once a few IE bugs are fixed it will go live on the metavid site. If you have firefox you can check out the demo page now New features of this mv_embed release include:

(more…)

2 comments by dale

Open Media Updates

Thought I would send out a quick update of some open media happenings:

Super Open Media Platform: Everyone should check out Chris Doubles SVG + firefox3 video element demo. Similar to a silverlight demo for rotating still images, this demo takes the next step and swaps in ogg video inside SVG elements. This is done in an entirely free software and is patent unencumbered (for example notice the “we cant redistribute this edition” quote here in open source silverlight video implementations)

FOMS 2008: Building on the success of FOMS 2007 free & open source software developers will again converge in January to iron out the stumbling blocks to wide scale free-media adoption. Check out FOMS 2008

Miro road to 1.0: Miro previously known as Democracy Player is quickly nearing 1.0. Check out the latest feature set and get ready for the official release

7 comments by dale

Searching The Archive

Each close caption segment is a few sentences. When doing searches keep in mind that a sentence may break mid stream so exact phrase match may be missed in broken sentences. The metavid search process currently uses mysql FULLTEXT SEARCH in boolean mode. This means that you have a few parameters that you can control in doing search queries. For example if you search for “iraq war” that will match the exact phrase, or if you search for +iraq -war that will find only instances where iraq is mentioned and war is not mentioned. You can see the full documentation on boolean full text searches in mysqls documentation.

I have also updated the search page and front page to highlight popular queries that people have been making.

update: you can now also jump to any available day on the search page.

Add comment by dale