The Personal Democracy Forum conference is under way here in NY. A lot of really cool projects and talks I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In questioning the structure of current online political mobilization he highlighted the network capacity to build a new rather simply act in reaction to or attempt to open existing power structures. As an example Linus did not protest outside of Microsoft office for them to build a better OS, and Jimmy Wales did not throw stones at Britannica until they became more open. He points to new incorporations and ways to organize groups of people without rigid hierarchy or centralization.

In the context of video technologies there were some interesting projects as well. Remixamerica.org was showing their platform for remixing and promoting political videos using the open kaltura video editor. We will see about adding the metavid archive as a source for remixes Also mogulus was showing off their platform for realtime video broadcasting from a small portable nokia camara.

I will be giving a short demo of Metavid Tuesday afternoon.

Firefox 3 download day was a huge success and it features many improvement over firefox2. But as they say you can’t please everybody, and download issues were not the only blip on this otherwise exciting launch. Perhaps lost in the hoopla over Fierfox 3 impressive new features set is the html5 video support which did not make it into this release. While Chris Double has done an excellent job in building cross platform ogg theora support into Firefox the new implementation strategy raises some questions about the future vitality of open media and open web standards.

Specifically Mozilla current implementation strategy proposes supporting video via hooks into the proprietary media platforms for windows and mac. i.e Firefox on mac will hook into quicktime, Firefox on windows will hook into direct show, while Firefox in Linux will hook into gstreamer…  This approach risks abandoning support for a baseline free codec (ie ogg theora) for the video tag. We can only hope the base cross platform theora support code that is already written is not abandoned as they add in these hooks.

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A few updates to metavidWiki have been rolled out recently, thought I would take a quick opportunity to point them out.

Search

Search now has a more “google-like” display with text links to “Watch Clip” and “Improve Transcript“. This should make it clear that you can play search results inline and gives the inline search results a larger native video resolution play window.

Remote Embedding:

The remote embedding functionality has been enhanced to include inline transcript with auto scrolling and transcript layer selection. This feature can also be used to select between language tracks. (our site currently only has a single language track) The transcript format is in CMML. So you could use the mv_embed library with other CMS systems to embed video with transcript selection.

Near Future

Our summer of code student Stjepan Rajko is hard at work on adding in compatibility with flash flv video clips. This will enable “html5 like” syntax with ogg video and could use flash video as a backup. Sort of a supper version of Mike Chambers hack with all the added benefits of mv_embed library: inline transcripts/translations , references to download the clip, embed it, playlists etc

Steel this film I and II have helped shape the debate on copyright policy. The first film focused on the raid against the pirate bay and file sharing culture. Part II took on the broader copyright debate.

Now they are making their interview footage from Steel This Film II available for remixing. Their site features ogg video with time segment requests (similar to what we do here on metavid) and synced transcripts for search. Footage is made available in ogg theora & high quality HDV via bittorrent. They encurge people to download and reuse the footage.

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