Open Source Video

Open Source City festival

A good way to start the summer: From 20th to 22nd June 2008 folly and SoundNetwork are bringing Open Source City; a micro-festival of art and music to Liverpool, as part of the European Capital of Culture.
Read more about the festival.
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Then you win

thenyouwin.yooook.org

A sympathetic documentary project in the making: Then you win is an open content project by France based organisations Loin de l’Œil and Yooook. Check the FAQ for more concrete info.

Ekta Parishad is a mass movement based on Gandhian principle – organized in October 2007 the “Janadesh”, the largest non-violent gathering in India since its independence. For four months, we travelled across India to tell the Ekta Parishad adventure, from its origins to its biggest achievement… three movies are on post-production!
Loin de l’Œil has organized the shooting of three films related to the movement Ekta Parishad, from its origins in the early 70’s to its biggest achievement – the Janadesh. Total duration will be about 1:30 to 2 hours.

The name of the project was suggested by that famous Mahatma Gandhi’s quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

Then You Win plays an interesting game with opening the content: The movies are copyrigted, but can be ‘freed’ by donating money: the more money rolls in, the more open its contents will be published.

“By your donations you can help the project to reach more levels of freedom of use. (…) There are many ways to participate in freeing the copyright covering the three documentaries, but money is the concrete point to reach the freedom steps.”

Check out more on this policy here.

The films are edited using Cinelerra, if you are in the region of Toulouse and want to contribute: it is much appreciated.

R+R streaming walks

As part of the exhibition Place@Space in art center Z33 I have made a ‘Routes + Routines’ installation and organise some walks that are streamed and can be viewed in the exhibition room. Clips from the stream are added to a random ‘film’ that is subtitled by a choice from quotes and citations from legal texts concerning internet access control from different sources; law texts, terms of use documents, eu directives etc. These texts are wallpapered in the expo space. […]

OVL Saturday: Miro

We spent some saturday afternoon time installing the current version 1.2 of the Internet tv application Miro. Christina installed it on her G4 Power mac running Mac OSX 10.4.10 and I updated at the same time an old version 0.9.8.0 Beta on my Linux Ubuntu box. After a smooth upate from the Synaptic package manager and equally smooth install from the Miro download page an immediately visible difference to older versions is the IHeartMiro pop up window.

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SMplayer

I never bothered to install it, thinking that Mplayer’s command line options gave me everything I needed .. but finally gave SMplayer a try and I am enjoying it a lot.

“One of the most interesting features of SMPlayer: it remembers the settings of all files you play. So you start to watch a movie but you have to leave… don’t worry, when you open that movie again it will resume at the same point you left it, and with the same settings: audio track, subtitles, volume…”
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Free as in: Big Money

One of the introductory keynotes to this years Fosdem addressed the widespread use of Linux systems in Hollywood film production companies such as Walt Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks. Speakers were Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera. Both work for MovieEditor.com: an entertainment and technology company based in Beverly Hills focusing on ‘upbeat commercial projects’, which might explain why their talk in the context of an Open Source Developers meeting was slightly out of tune. Rowe is also project leader of Cinepaint.

I was looking forward to an occasion to hear about the relationship between the film industry and the free software world and was hoping on some insight in how commercial Linux based application can help further develop free video software projects. I have followed only the last three issues of Fosdem and noticed an abscence of developers / rooms on video related issues, so this prominently announced talk seemed an outstanding opportunity to catch up on this.
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0xdb

The 0xdb is a film database which collects metadata, provides citations, analyzes and contextualizes different types of media, and makes both the information it gathers and the tools it employs available for personal, non-commercial use.

It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. There are many great online databases, Wikipedia, the All Media Guide or the IMDb, that make this data available. Oxdb automatically retrieves information from various of these sources.

0xdb is being developed and maintained as part of a project named The Oil of the 21st Century, which aims at a both practical and theoretical deconstruction of current concepts of Intellectual Property. The source code of the project will be published under the GPL.

More questions and answers can be found in the FAQ.

dotSUB

Friday 18 january, Michael Smolens, Founder and CEO of DotSub gave the fastest pitch ever during the Video Vortex event in Amsterdam.
dotSUB is an online tool which facilitates easy transcription and translating of subtitles. I uploaded a short clip to have a go at it. Feel free to log in and play with it, this is a test to see how the tool works, it serves no other purposes.
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Open source pre-production

” Celtx has all the tools you need to write, organize and collaborate in one modern, Internet friendly, free software application. It’s the most complete media pre-production software program available anywhere, at any cost.”

Celtx is released under a license close to the Mozilla Public License. With some restrictions added. If you want to modify and redistribute, check the license.

Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5

In a previous post, we were enthusiastic about the new developments of html5 that would include the video tag and its implementation in the royalty-free format ogg/vorbis. But:

“As some of you may be aware, the WHATWG has dropped the recommendation for Theora and Vorbis in the video/audio section of the HTML 5 specification. Many believe it’s due to pressure from Nokia and Apple and, while that may be correct, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

Read the article on spreadopensourcemedia that sums up quite well the whole issue.