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

We are pleased to announce that MetaVidWiki  (link) is now in open beta. We look forward to you comments, suggestions, and bug reports on this new free platform for community audio video participation.

We have put together a new extended screen cast demoing MetaVidWiki features available here on metavid. (also available on google video, and xvid copy here (23 megs) ). Editing on MetaVidWiki site is now open to anyone that can pass a audio or visual captcha test…

So check out the demo video, try some searches, and then try improving the archive by syncing a transcript or improving some text content

Simultaneously we are releasing the software that powers metavid: MetaVidWiki extension (v.01). It has been packaged and released for other cool re-uses of the code base. The Mv_Embed package has been updated to version .7 and released as well.

Read on for Technical Feature overview:

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As you may have noticed there the site is undergoing maintenance as we transition to a new server and new wiki based software system. Feel to check out the MetaVidWiki site as seen in previous posted screen casts. We are in the process improving documentation and cleaning up the wiki for wider sharing next week. Right now editing is restricted but will be opened up shortly. The existing (old) metavid site will remain accessible

update: There are a few issues that we have run into as the site comes online. We are working hard on getting everything ready for the “general public”. Watch this blog (and others) for a site launch announcement, and feel free to report issues on the wiki

The metavidWiki svn has been relocated to wikimedia svn. This will enable tighter integration into the mediaWiki developer ecosystem. Enabling translations via excellent betawiki project, integrated bug tracking and friendly IRC bots reporting svn commits on #metavid

Development continues on metavidWiki and we hope to launch the mediaWiki extension with the congress video dataset within a few weeks. Keep on eye on this space for more updates

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:

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Wikimania 07 is upon us. I will be presenting the work in progress metavid mediaWiki extension. The abstract is as follows:

Metavid Wiki - Real Time Collaborative Semantic Audio/Video Metadata in MediaWiki. Metavid Wiki is the in development second iteration of the Metavid archive project (metavid.org). Metavid Wiki builds off of the MediaWiki code base, the semantic wiki extension and the first version of the metavid. Metavid Wiki employs a structured temporal name space with the wiki page model to enable dynamic, versioned metadata for arbitrary stream segments. Congressional data along with stream metadata is used to build a rich query space for stream segment search. These segments can then be recombined into versioned sequences and referenced internally or externally

update: for audio podcasts of the event check out wikipedia weekly

update:  slides are available here

The House and Senate are off this week for Independence Day observence; we’re using this break as an opportunity to break in our brand new admin interface, which makes the numerous behind-the-scenes tasks involved in transcoding and bringing the footage online much more streamlined. By the time Congress returns on the 9th, we expect to be caught up and able to get new footage online within a day or so of air — hopefully sooner.

The House and Senate are off this week for Independence Day observence; we’re using this break as an opportunity to break in our brand new admin interface, which makes the numerous behind-the-scenes tasks involved in transcoding and bringing the footage online much more streamlined. By the time Congress returns on the 9th, we expect to be caught up and able to get new footage online within a day or so of air — hopefully sooner.

Given the many parallel projects to bring ogg theora into the many browser platforms it can easily get confusing. In this post I will give an update on the embed video projects that I have been following in the development of the latest mv_embed script. This script is a rewrite of the mv embed script with the intentions of bridging support for video tag from the html5 spec to non html5 browsers. Once the mv_embed script is included it goes through the page and rewrites all the html5 video tags with whatever playback method the client supports, letting web developers use the future html5 video tag today! See the sample page.
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As a few people have pointed out the code repository was down the last few days this was a big bummer. This happened because ucsc’s engineering did a migration to Gforge Advanced Server and there was some downtime in between. But now it should all be working with a new the new & updated code management system.The new metavid code repository can be accessed here.

Also we have updated the links If you find a dforge link let us know, also if you previously had a developer account on dforge you will need to recreate it to re-join the metavid development.

Our apologies for the downtime.