Related to the discussion of size and bitrate of uploaded video
discussions on wikivideo-l, I thought it would be nice to share the
latest efforts on the TimedMediaHandler extension.
This extension will help make the size and bitrate choices less of an
issue, and will just be a matter of uploading the highest quality
version you can. The extension auto transcodes to a few different
derivative formats.
Its best illustrated by features overview page: ( best viewed with
Firefox 4 )
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/timedmedia/Main_Page
This extension standardises a lot of features of the mwEmbed player
gadget, like pop-up gallery videos, temporal media fragments, timed
text, iframe embed video sharing, html5 standard "video", "source" and
"track" page output, etc.
The bottom clip illustrates a key feature of this extension with a real
commons "media of the day" clip from a few days back. JJ Harrison
uploaded a very nice, very encyclopaedic HD nature clip, but at
1920x1088 and 13mbs it fails to playback almost any time some tires to
play it :( With this extension we get the 'right' resolution given the
embed size, and have easy access to switch streams as you go into
fullscreen if your computer / connection supports it.
There are still a few resource loader integration issues to work out
before more widely sharing these efforts, but I thought I would share it
on these list to get some early feedback.
I have filed a tracking bug
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27699 to keep track of
its progress toward deployment. If you file related related bugs or
feature requests, you can tag them with that tracking bug.
Also got started on a mediawiki.org extension page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler
peace,
michael
In Firefox 3.6.13 on Linux, I can show Ogg Theora videos just fine,
which is a great step forward from earlier versions a year ago.
But there are still bugs, where the playback just hangs. I have
no way to tell if this is a poorly encoded video or a browser bug
or something relating to my screen driver. All I know is that it
happens more often for videos with higher bitrate. As a programmer,
I could guess that there is some buffer competition, a combination
of buffer boundaries and time racing, that causes a deadlock.
I have no way to know the reason or whether it is unique to me.
Too few people watch videos in Wikipedia, so I have no user base
to draw conclusions from. The source code is available, but I
don't want to take the time to specialize in video decoding.
This headache is already taking far too much of my time.
For one video, I changed the encoding and this made the problem
occur less frequently for me. This 720 x 544 pixel, 15 minute
video was 116 MB when first encoded with "ffmpeg2theora" without
parameters, so to make it pass under the 100 MB limit I added
"-v 4" (lowercase v for video quality), to slightly reduce the
video quality. But it hanged just too often, and by encoding
with "-V 600" (uppercase V for bitrate, 600 kbit/s), it runs
a lot more smooth on my laptop. You can try either version at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%A4n_och_maskiner_1936.ogv
Looking at these 1200 Dutch videos,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Media_from_Open_Beelden
they are just 320x240 pixels, which is another way to get
smaller files and lower bitrates.
Is that something I should settle for? Will I live happier
and prosper if I scale all videos to half their size?
Maybe in 2-3 years time, when the 100 MB limit has been
lifted and Firefox 4.x offers a more mature video playback,
we can upload the same videos in better resolution?
Should we make this a recommendation? Do we have statistics
on the resolution and bitrate of the videos on Commons?
Who did the job with the Dutch films? How did they reason?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Thanks, Sam. Another opportunity here may be for the community to help define new citation standards for time-based media. There are no commonly accepted practices yet - still - for how to write and punctuate references to film and sound in captions, footnotes, and bibliographies.
-- Peter.
Peter B. Kaufman
Executive Producer
Intelligent Television
Direct: (212) 316-5494
Mobile: (917) 969-7756
Skype: pbkauf
Twitter: #pbkauf
www.intelligenttelevision.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Klein [mailto:meta.sj@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 08:24 PM
To: 'Opportunities for video in the Wikimedia universe, tech help'
Cc: 'Wikimedia Commons'
Subject: Re: [Wikivideo-l] OpenCourseware videos, video players, and more
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:> 2011/2/10 Samuel Klein :>> OCW wants a failproof way to instruct people to set up their browsers>> so that our media player works.>> Use Flash video. *ducks*This comment did come up :) The OCW staff were sympathetic andappreciated the fact that Wikipedia is a visible proponent of the needfor a free toolchain. But they want to convince professors who may beon the fence about releasing their videos under a free licensecomfortable with it. Profs who appreciate these subtletie won't be onthe fence.> The best you can do for now is recommend people install Firefox (you> may want to use the beta for the best experience).OK. That addresses the first Q; I will recommend profs be pointed here:http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/I hope to have more progress/uploads in time for the Free Culturegathering next weekend.At some point a table like this one specifically for compatibilitywith our player would be useful:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Table< Q3: Do we have historical stats on the # of media files in Commons byfiletype or mediatype?Or current stats? Hans Westerhof at the Dutch Institute for Sound andVision joined for the meeting (he is visiting Cambridge for a month)and said that the 1000 news clips they've uploaded made up 10% of thevideo on Commons at the time. I wonder if that's still the case.< Q5: why is the link to the permissions email still so hard to find?I am inclined to point people to special:uploadwizard, another finebeta, even though it elides this part of the permissions process, andto encourage them to categorize uploads with a simple memorable tag.It would be useful to be able to generate an upload URL that has a setof categories already included as an argument, so that everyone usingthat URL would have those tags applied to uploaded media.< Q6: do we still have that 100MB file size limit? can we change this to 500MB?Should this be asked on wikitech instead?Sam.-- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266_______________________________________________Wikivideo-l mailing listWikivideo-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikivideo-l
Hello,
There are some amazing and educational videos in MIT's OpenCourseWare
collection, and it's been on my mind for a while that none of them are
on Wikipedia, even though the copyright holders (the profs) often
would love for them to be.
Over the past weeks, I've been working with Peter Kaufman (Intelligent
Television), Ben Moskowitz (OVA), and some of MIT's OpenCourseWare
team to identify a few videos that could be split up into useful
sections to illustrate math and science articles on Wikipedia.
You can see a few examples from Prof. Walter Lewin's physics courses here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion
OCW is interested in running a small project, with clips from ~100
course videos, to figure out how we can make this work on a larger
scale, and what the interest and response will be. If this is
successful, we could add thousands of great clips to commons.
(Professors own the rights to their videos, and the default (c) on OCW
is CC-NC, so each prof must explicitly release their videos under
CC-SA before they can be used in articles.)
Working on this project - my first work with video for awhile - raised
a few questions, below.
OCW wants a failproof way to instruct people to set up their browsers
so that our media player works. Of the MIT staff who tried it, 3 of 10
had problems until they installed another browser or fiddled
around.(!)
Q1: Is there a page that says "choose your OS below, follow the link
to download the lates browser version, and the player will work" ?
Q2: Do we have data on the % of our visitors for whom the video-player
doesn't work properly? (to answer the question I got twice today:
"will all readers actually be able to use these videos?")
Q3: Do we have historical stats on the # of media files in Commons by
filetype or mediatype?
I am looking for a Boston-local ambassador who can work with Peter
(whose staff offered to do the clip-selection and transcoding for this
pilot) and the university (which will reach out to a few more
professors to find interest) to step through the process a few times,
from choosing suitable clips and important science articles needing
illustration, through to sending a permissions email to OTRS.
Q4: can we start offering transcoding automatically, for people who
upload non-ogg formats? Dailymotion seems to do this flawlessly,
perhaps we can learn from their toolchain.
Q5: why is the link to the permissions email still so hard to find?
Is there a new snazzy upload form that people can be pointed to that
lets uploaders say:
- "this file is by FOO who releases it under license L" ...
- "send an email to FOO through this form, reminding them to confirm
the license release"
Q6: do we still have that 100MB file size limit? can we change this to 500MB?
Q7: people often need access to raw high-res media: for restoration,
manipulating full-size animation frames, or editing HD video. these
can be a few GB in size. Is there any plan to set up a
quarantine/scratch space where these files can be uploaded and shared?
Thanks for any pointers and answers, including to relevant threads
that I may have missed,
Sam.
--
Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
I found this very interesting film from 1937, that I strongly
believe is free from copyright. It is 15 minutes and presents
a Swedish newspaper, including several of its journalists,
and a tour around the editorial and printing offices.
From this film, I made 5-10 second long clips that present
each journalist, to illustrate many Wikipedia articles,
and some 1-2 minute clips to present printing technology.
I uploaded each clip separately, adding categories and
descriptions in English and Swedish.
This takes a lot of time!
In addition, I created Timed Text subtitles for some of
my clips, but these are of course not shown for the full
film, since they are two different items. To get subtitles
for the full film, I would have to copy the text and
recompute all the time offsets.
Whole film,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Varje_dag_en_v%C3%A4rldsrevy.ogv
A clip with English text, explaining page layout,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ombrytning_Stockholms-Tidningen_1937…
The HTML 5 <video> tag has attributes for start and stop time,
so shouldn't it be possible to just upload the whole film once
and then specify these attributes in each article, e.g.
[[File:myfilm.ogv|thumb|start=4:38|end=4:47|John Doe]]?
Is this possible today? Is it used anywhere, so I can see an
example?
This film comes from a new website, filmarkivet.se, which was
launched just this month. It's a cooperation between the
archives of the Swedish Film Institute and the multimedia
department of the Swedish National Library. I happen to know
the people in both places, so we should establish some formal
cooperation as soon as the head of archives is back from
the Berlin film festival.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Hello Wikivideo list members,
I'm contacting you on the behalf of the Participatory Culture Foundation.
You might have heard of Universal Subtitles <http://universalsubtitles.org/>,
a project we are currently working that enables collaborative creation and
editing of subtitles for online video. Great for reaching an audience that
doesn't speak your language, or to improve accessibility for deaf and hard
of hearing users.
We're currently working on a list of social interest videos, as well as on a
page where deaf and hard of hearing users can suggest social videos they'd
like subtitled. We are also working with organizations to ask what videos
they would like subbed. This is where you come in: it is a chance for
Wikivideo to get free captions and translations from volunteers.
So, if you'd like to send me links for one to four videos you'd like
captioned and translated, we'll get the ball rolling!
Best regards,
Ed
Participatory Culture Foundation