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

Google Summer of Code 08 will start accepting applications Monday, March 24, 2008. I have submitted a few metavid related project ideas under the xiph and wikipedia foundation organizations and offered to mentor them.

Google’s Summer of Code is a great program, as a student in summer of code 06 I worked on early video integration for mediaWiki. It was a positive experience and got me more involved with free/open source software. If your a student interested in open media I recommend you take a look at the many great project ideas for xiph foundation. There are lots of other great projects and organizations to work with as well.

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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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

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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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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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.

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I hacked out a simple mediaWiki extension to use the mv_embed script. Its identical to the html based mv_embed except that description text is parsed as wiki text instead of html and it resolves file names for wiki video/image titles. This allows mediaWiki to easily include inline or external playlists. Having the playlist inline facilitates basic versioned sequence building. For now mod_annodex is need for segmentation, but I am working on a native php script that should allow easy integration of ogg segmentation wherever php is supported. Drag and drop sequences is also being working on in the metavid medaWiki extension but is still a few weeks away from public demoing. Watch for a screen capture post in the near future

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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