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

Each close caption segment is a few sentences. When doing searches keep in mind that a sentence may break mid stream so exact phrase match may be missed in broken sentences. The metavid search process currently uses mysql FULLTEXT SEARCH in boolean mode. This means that you have a few parameters that you can control in doing search queries. For example if you search for “iraq war” that will match the exact phrase, or if you search for +iraq -war that will find only instances where iraq is mentioned and war is not mentioned. You can see the full documentation on boolean full text searches in mysqls documentation.

I have also updated the search page and front page to highlight popular queries that people have been making.

update: you can now also jump to any available day on the search page.

Metavid has started to put all the original mpeg2 captures onto archive.org. (Previously we were just removing them because of space considerations) But now when ever you pull up a recent stream you should now have access to the mpeg2 original. For example the senate proceeding for june 4th now links to its associative stream on archive.org. Archive.org also makes the stream available in other formats such as flash flv and mpeg4. To see a list of all the streams available on archive.org so far you can check the U.S congress category.

Watch this space for more interesting collaboration with archive.org in the future:)

In case you have not been following the metavid in use part of the wiki, I thought I would mention some of the usage of the metavid dataset & site here:

Click.TV has let us know about a prototype they have created for using their flash application with a enhanced version of the data set that metavid makes available. The flash video interface is very responsive and we aspire to such fluidity with open source video and should be getting there soon

GovTrack.us is syndication friendly system for tracking government representatives. They now link into metavids clips on their people pages (on the left hand side).

And finally bloggers are using some clips: findlaw and boogiechimpdigital have used the embed clip function to put a metavid clip right into their blog postings.