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
I was not able to attend the conference but fortunately people took
notes :) To which I added some additional notes. The notes offer a nice
little brain storming session on non-textual media ( mostly video)
http://2011.westcoastwikicon.org/wiki/Non-Textual_Media
peace,
michael
Hello,
I know of two different groups that have larger video files they would
like to post to commons.
1) profs with videos on OpenCourseWare that also want them to be
available for remixing and reuse in Wikimedia projecst.
2) documentary filmmakers that want to share their raw material from
interviews and background footage, particularly for documentaries
about Wiki[m]edia.
Examples of the first include a few class-length videos about
classical mechanics, each 150-200MB long, which could be easily broken
down into dozens of clips suitable for illustrating part of various
physics articles and books.
Examples of the second include the material from the original Wikimentary
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3Amovies%20AND%20collecti…
and the footage from Truth in Numbers?, the former already posted to
the Internet Archive, the latter proposed for uploading and sharing
soon. Since TiN? has ~1TB of footage to share from the past 5 years,
I encouraged them to join this list.
Questions;
--> where should raw original media be posted? I'd like to say
'Commons' but the file size limits prevents that at present. The
Internet Archive solution seems like it may work in theory but is hard
to use in practice.
--> how do we handle high res original formats vs. lighter formats
suitable for quick editing? I assume we don't have tools that
automatically rescale resolution the way we have them for images.
--> have we ever had a bulk upload of video clips?
Sam.
--
Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
The preferred subtitle format for videos seems to be .srt -- does that
cover all CC/subtitling options?
Ex: the list of subtitle files linked from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_User_Name_MEDIUM.ogv
Is it time to develop a version of interlangauge links for files like
these that are primarily text?
It's amazing how far we are able to get with template hacks
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Closed_cap) but we should
start thinking about how to do this cleanly for millions of items. At
the moment, while reading/working on one subtitle, I can't see what
others exist (or even get to a list in one click)
Also: how is a new subtitle matched with a video? Do we have an
automated way to draw from a video and a subtitle file and generate
the right video output? It sounded like manual work was required for
the Wikipedia video mentioned above to see the subtitles after
application.
--
Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
Hello everybody,
I recently noticed that Wikipedia has starting using a P2P based
system for distributing video, and since I am working on a similar
system I contacted Michael Dale who suggested that I send an email to
this list regarding this.
The most simple way to describe the system is that it is conceptually
very similar to HTTP with P2P support; the protocol is essentially
HTTP with additional commands to handle P2P operations.
Files are stored on a server that also keeps track of other hosts
where all or parts of the content can be found. Before downloading a
file, clients will contact the server to obtain general file
information, such as file and block size. Files are divided into
blocks and clients request a list of hosts where the blocks they want
to retrieve can be found. The list might contain only a fixed set of
addresses (such as that of the server and any mirrors), or it can
include the addresses of other clients that have retrieved the blocks
previously. Clients attempt to automatically determine the best hosts
from the list to retrieve the content from and later report successful
block downloads to the server.
The system also supports caches, similar to web caches, to reduce
redundant network traffic.
More information can be found here: http://www.inet.no/shepherd/p2pd/
The software was previously extensively tested on PlanetLab, but now
needs more testing after a major restructuring of the code. It also
needs to be ported to Windows.
It is in other words not yet ready for production usage, but it would
be interesting to discuss potential challenges with e.g., browser
integration when a P2P-based protocol is used for video streaming. Not
only will the protocol most likely not be directly supported by
browsers, but to get the most benefit from a P2P system users should
ideally continue to share the content they have downloaded after
having finished watching it. This will require some kind of server
process to continue running, perhaps independently of the browser.
Especially for infrequently accessed video files this would likely
have an impact on the degree to which using a P2P system will reduce
the server load.
The following page has links to a few documents that describe various
usage scenarios and some simple ways of integrating p2pd with a
browser: http://www.inet.no/shepherd/p2pd/docs.html
Any thoughts on these integration issues from the perspective of
Wikipedia?
Regards,
Karl-Andre' Skevik