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.
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
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.
Al Gore was on the Daily Show last night and had a good interview with Stewart. Gore criticizes the news/tv medium for its efforts to relate Congregational conversations to citizens. Television is a broken system that produces a one way conversation. Here is a snippet from the show.
While blog activity has been light the past few weeks, rest assured there has been good deal of svn activity I thought I would quickly share what I have been up to lately, and the targeted feature set for what we can call metavid 2.0
Metavid 2.0 is basically a complete code refactoring and extension of metavids feature set into the mediaWiki framework. (the software that runs every ones favorite encyclopedia). For a more details, read the rest of this blog entry and the targeted feature set on Metavid 2.0 wiki page
I’m very pleased to announce that Metavid has been awarded a grant by Sunlight Foundation. This grant will fund full-time development on this project for a year in addition to expansion of hardware infrastructure. We’re very excited about what this means for the project: more stability, new features and better accessibility.
We’re happy to continue our cooperation with Sunlight, whose mission is, “to use the transformative power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparence and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.”
Watch this space for announcements of what we are (and will soon be) implementing.
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.
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
This last Thursday and Friday just before linux.conf.au 2007, Open Source Media developers meet in Sydney, to hack on the future of Open Media. FOMS had a diversity of participants ranging from low level audio driver hackers & codec researchers to tool developers & online open media project maintainers all of whom worked together to identify next steps for open media.
The developer meeting established Community Goals for the near and long term. Goals include improving low level open media infrastructure, a push for native ogg theora playback in the base firefox install & getting embed oggplay support into mediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia).
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.
Engage Media has published a very 
I thought I would quickly share what I have been up to lately, and the targeted feature set for what we can call metavid 2.0
Some interesting conversations have been taking place in the 
This last Thursday and Friday just before