Updated screen-cast available here

you can grab the original xvid/mpeg4 clip (37.9 MB) and if all else fails its posted on youtube

As we work hard towards release candidates of the metavid Wiki extension and the official launch of the metavid congress archive project I thought I would quickly share a little preview of what we are up to. Its a very rough screencast my apologizes for the low volume and rough ending. We will make better screencasts to help with documentation and promotion of features in the future

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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

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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.

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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

I will be presenting a position paper at the W3C video workshop next week. I will be joined by Siliva 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.