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.
posted by aphid at 10:52 am
Some interesting conversations have been taking place in the whatwg standards group as people set about to design the standards for the future web platform. Out of this discussion the video element has been proposed as a standard way of embedding video content into the page. Implementation details are being discussed such as css styles for video playback controls and annodex like temporal stream reference. But most of the discussion has centered around the video element and its single standard baseline codec that web developers can count on being supported if they use the new video element. As free software intermixes with the process of standardization proprietary solutions fall to wayside and free codecs/containers become the only broadly supportable solution.
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posted by dale at 6:54 pm
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 
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posted by dale at 2:46 pm
Sunlight is hosting a $2K congress mashup contest. I (ofcourse) think metavid would make a great base for some interesting mashups. See our short screen grab demoing campaign contributions along side video. The APIs and platform is rough around the edges (things should improve once we start working on it full time ;)… more about that later)…For now the dataset should be usable by those willing to brave the bleeding edge. Let us know if you would like to use metavid data set and we will lend you our metavid expertise and hopefully make your vision is implementable 
If your just feeling conceptual maybe list your idea on the possibilities page.
If your ready to start hacking congress check out the developer resources in the wiki, and come by #metavid in irc.freenode.net
posted by dale at 10:34 am
