Open Source Video

CC Al Jazeera

Launch Press Release:
Al Jazeera Announces Launch of Free Footage under Creative Commons License

Doha Qatar – January 13, 2009: Al Jazeera Network today announced the world’s first repository of broadcast quality video footage released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license. Select Al Jazeera video footage – at this time footage of the War on Gaza – will be available for free to be downloaded, shared, remixed, subtitled and eventually by users and TV stations across the world with acknowledgement to Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera will release its exclusive Arabic and English coverage produced by the Network’s correspondents and crews in the Gaza Strip online at http://cc.aljazeera.net. The ongoing war and crisis in Gaza, together with the scarcity of news footage available, make the repository a key resource for anyone producing content on the current situation.
[…]

Sita hates copyright jail

From Questioncopyright.org:
“Animator Nina Paley has announced on her blog her plans to make her award-winning, feature-length film “Sita Sings The Blues” available online for free decentralized distribution, as soon as she gets it out of copyright jail.

As Nina Paley told us in her interview here last November, in order to release Sita, the monopoly holders for some of the musical compositions used in the film have to be paid off (yes, even though the songs were written in the 1920s). The approximate cost of this will be US $50,000 (negotiations are still under way). Nina is taking out a loan to pay this up front; funds we raise will go toward paying off that loan and toward other expenses related to distribution.”

Read her motivation and plans to decriminalise and freely distribute the film on Nina Paleys weblog.

UPDATE:
Sita sings the blues is available under a CC license:
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
and can be downloaded in multiple formats from:
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSites

Cinelerra is a she

When you follow the OSvideo blog and other sites on video, you will probably have noticed that video often is a predominantly male domain where guys like to revel in tech-talk about hardware, devices, or cunning code hacks. Thanks to Raffaella Traniello and the The Newbies’ front of Cinelerra we are reminded that our favorite editor Cinelerra is a SHE and she offers real possibilities for curious people of all ages and genders who are not immediately attracted to simplicity and things that just work.
[…]

Crazed Cinelerra 1080P

Dealing with a new media format in Linux and Cinelerra is never easy. But if you have patience, it is very satisfying to get a project done that makes your friends say “Wow” or have a laugh.

Cinelerra enthusiast the Mule bought himself a new Canon 5D still-image camera and posts findings of his experiments with the 1080p video-output of this image capturing giant on his weblog; check out those beautiful images and handy encoding suggestions.

— when you are looking for how to transcode footage for the purpose of editing in Cinelerra, uploading to online video services or viewing it on a media player, this post contains some nifty tips that could even work with video files that have been outputted in similar formats by last years model cameras 😉

Find other postings on Cinelerra related experiments in the Cinelerra thread

Whose is this song

During the Collaborative Online Video workshop, Seda Gurses, who is connected to the hypermedia and databases research group at the University of Leuven, showed a trailer of the film Whose Is This Song? by Adela Peeva, to illustrate that data travels beyond defined bounderies and legal property arrangements, that re-use and appropriation by different actors is quite common to cultural and folkloristic practices, not surprising in the age of endless debates on piracy, file sharing and digital rights management, but the protagonists in this documentary demonstrate that even singing a seemingly harmless song can stir up politically charged emotions about cultural territory, authorship, the right to copy and ownership of cultural expressions.

Stoffel Debuysere writes a nice post about the film on his blog Diagonal Thoughts, with embedded low quality video footage.

Find here another interesting review.

Here’s a videoclip of Seda’s introduction. (Ogg video, 18 min, 58 mb)

Kaltura 1.0

Hi,

I’m excited to update you that today we have officially launched our open source video module for Drupal, a leading open source Content Management Platform used by more than a million sites.

Kaltura’s All in One Video Module enables Drupal site-builders to easily add video and rich-media functionalities to their Drupal sites. The module is extremely flexible, easy to customize and comes with 10GB of hosting and streaming that can be later upgraded. It was designed specifically for Drupal and seamlessly integrates with several key Drupal features and modules, including CCK, Views, cron, tags and taxonomy, and user permissions.

Kaltura’s open source video platform is one of the fastest growing online video solutions on the market. We have been seeing massive growth over the past couple of months, with more than 15,000 publishers using our technology, and hundreds joining every day. With the economic downturn, more and more leading publishers are switching over to Kaltura’s platform to benefit from cutting-edge technology with maximum flexibility at a fraction of the cost.
[…]

Bitnik + 68septante: copyleft film

Uploaded to Archive.org is a full length one hour unedited recording of the Pirate.tv session which took place in bookshop Quarantaine in Brussels on November 20, 2008 in the framework of the Collaborative Online Video workshop.
Recorded by Bitnik Mediengruppe, the evening consisted of a Videotheque Nomade program compiled by 68septante. On television sets spread throughout the bookshop following films, published copyleft or under a cc license could be watched:

Qu’est ce que le copyleft?, LL de Mars 6’50 – vo fr (www.le-terrier.net)
Frontière de Jérôme Giller 6′ – vo fr st en (http://www.jeromegiller.net/video_frontiere.php) / la Vidéothèque Nomade : http://www.6870.be/spip.php?article204
Nécessaire(s) territoire(s), Benoit Perraud 21′ – vo fr (http://www.lafamilledigitale.org/fr/necessaire-s-territoire-s.html) et http://www.6870.be/spip.php?article222 dans la Vidéothèque Nomade

With bricolaged appearances by several protagonists of the workshop Collaborative Online Video

Strobo scare

Via the Makezine blog:

What a network camera combined with motion can do to keep your cat away from your plants: check out the Blender Defenderproject

” Have a cat that won’t stay off your counters? I do. I finally got fed up with it enough to do something about it: scare the crap out of him with a motion-detecting blender (while recording the results for my own amusement, of course). ”

thanks Wendy

Collaborative Online Video

Coming soon !

We’re happy to announce the upcoming Open Source Video Libre workshop + presentations around collective video distribution. The workshop consists of a series of hands on exercises in sharing (P2P) video, distributed editing and Content Management Systems for video sharing and archiving, and a series of evening presentations focusing on inventive practices of video-sharing. The workshop explores the possibilities of open source codecs, non lineair video browsing, collabortive working methods and collective approaches.

The workshop features both international and local guest artists, coders, video makers and media collectives. Amongst others: Domagoj Smoljo, Carmen Weisskopf, Shaina Anand, Adnan Hadzi / Deptford.tv, Guy van Belle, Florian Schneider, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Hadrian Bnin-Bninski, Loïc Vanderstichelen, Andy Nicholson, Michael Murtaugh, 68septante, Vox, Miro.

On the Collaborative Video wiki you can find the up to date info.

You can download a PDF of the program here (65kb)

Here’s a flyer in pdf format announcing the weekend events in Nova-Cinema. (600kb)

Video tag in Firefox, an update

Spotted by Pierre Huyghebaert on Kein.org

It was my last day at ISEA 2008 in Singapore and we were supposed to have a dinner with noborder/no one is illegal activists and the panelists of the bordercrossing theme, when jaromil came down the street smiling all over the face: “I have great news” he screamed. “Firefox 3.1 will support OGG Theora!”

In other words: This is most likely the breakthrough for open video on the web! OGG THEORA is the only open source video encoding suite. It is available for general use after the bitstream format for Theora was frozen Thursday, 2004 July 1.

Read more

You can also follow the works done on the implementation here, here and here