Hey,
I'm going to stream a conference, i'm using pure HTML5 video-tag for
now (with cortado fallback), but I'm looking into using mwembed or a
similar player if it can provide more features and niceties.
One requirement of this particular conference is that captioning
(subtitles) is present.
I'm thinking about using COMET for this, so ajax server-side push
messages, and built a small website for the translator to sit and type
in the text.
Has anyone else looked into this? Obviously, synchronization is a huge
problem, and that has been fixed in the spec, but none of the browsers
has implemented it, so everything will be horribly out of sync, but
sync is no requirement (but very nice of course).
Also, as an aside, it'd be nice to have a chat, where people watching
the stream can chat, and maybe get Twitter and Identica-messages into
the chat box when they arrive. With the comet approach this should be
quite doable.
--
Beste helsing,
Odin Hørthe Omdal <odin.omdal(a)gmail.com>
http://velmont.no
Dear SMIL and WikiMedia folks, I wanted to bring this to your attention:
The HTML5-driven Wikimedia "sequencer" - a template-based online video
editor - stores the EDL (Edit Decision List) in the SMIL format.
There's a recent introductory blog post [1] about it.
You can see an example for yourself by opening this page [2] with
Firefox 4 (preferably), by clicking on "Edit Sequence", then by
clicking on the "View" button in the upper-left corner, followed by
"Sequence SMIL XML" from the popup menu. The SMIL 3.0 source will be
revealed. For convenience, I quoted the XML source at the bottom of
this email.
This appears to be a custom version of what I would normally qualify
as SMIL, at least (as far as I can tell) not something based on the
normative Scalability Framework [3], nor based on an existing subset
of SMIL (see Modularization and Profiling [4]).
For example, the format overrides the normal SMIL namespace for "img"
and "ref" with xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", although I'm a
bit confused as I can't see any XHTML constructs there. There's a
combination of XML attribute name/value pairs coming from SMIL a well
as from some domain-specific markup (none of which seem to belong to
the specified namespace). The format also injects arbitrary parameters
into media objects using nested "param" tags (and "name" + "value"
pairs), thereby adding another layer of extensibility (why mix native
attributes and the param element ?).
I am wondering whether there is scope in this "lab" project to discuss
the EDL syntax ? It would be great if the final format was compatible
with SMIL user agents (playback engines and production tools). I am
sure that simple changes could be made to "clean-up" the namespaces
and to define an XML schema that draws the boundaries between SMIL and
domain-specific markup.
The statement from the blog "The SMIL spec has evolved over time and
has become famous for being very large and complicated to implement in
a real world player" may be true for the specification as a whole, but
not for a domain-specific subset ;) Just look at SVG or DAISY as
prime examples of standards that integrate only the strictly-necessary
parts of SMIL.
The claim that "Another nice feature of SMIL xml is that it is
extensible for custom components" may be true indeed, but this is not
quite achieved with the proposed format, as it doesn't conform to the
extensibility guidelines.
I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Feel free to correct me
if I got something wrong ! :)
I assume the "public-smil" and "wikivideo-l" mailing lists are most
appropriate to continue this discussion, but I also CC'ed the more
mature WikiMedia technical lists to ensure this message reaches "whom
it may concern" :)
[1]
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/video-labs-kaltura-html5-sequencer-av…
[2]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sequence:Cats&withJS=MediaWi…
[3]
http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL3/smil-scalabilityFramework.html
[4]
http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL/smil-modules.html
----- SNIP ----8<---------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<smil baseProfile="Language" version="3.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/SMIL
">
<head>
<meta name="title" content="Cats"/>
<transition xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
id="REF_5_fadeFromColor" type="fade" dur="0:02" fadeColor="#000000"
subtype="fadeFromColor">
</transition>
</head>
<body id="seq_0">
<par id="par_1">
<seq title="Video Track 1" tracktype="video"
id="seq_2">
<ref xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/
xhtml" type="application/x-wikitemplate"
apititlekey="Template:SequenceTitleBlackBG" apiprovider="commons"
dur="0:06" id="REF_5" transIn="REF_5_fadeFromColor">
<param name="Title" value="House Catff" />
<param name="SubTitle" value="English House Cat
Article <br> ''Read by DollieLlama'' " />
<param name="Image"
value="File:Olhos_de_um_gato-3.jpg" />
</ref>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="0:03"
title="Spielendes Kätzchen" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Spielendes_K%C3%A4tzchen…
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Spielendes_K%C3%A4…
" id="IMG_4" panZoom="0%, 0%, 100%, 100%">
<param name="id" value="3494791" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Spielendes_Kätzchen.JPG" />
</img>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="2"
title="Woman with Cat" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Woman_with_Cat.jpg
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/Woman_with_Cat.jpg…
" id="IMG_0" panZoom="6%, -13%, 170%, 127%">
<param name="id" value="1410943" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Woman_with_Cat.jpg" />
</img>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="0:03"
title="Cat and mouse" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Cat_and_mouse.jpg/…
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Cat_and_mouse.jpg/…
" id="IMG_1" panZoom="0%, -81%, 196%, 147%">
<param name="id" value="6979116" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Cat_and_mouse.jpg" />
</img>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="0:05"
title="Ancient Egyptian bronze cat" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Ancient_Egyptian_b…
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Ancient_Egyptian_b…
" id="IMG_5" panZoom="-1%, -35%, 181%, 135%">
<param name="id" value="3804250" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Ancient_Egyptian_bronze_cat.jpg" />
</img>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="2"
title="Catstalkprey" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Catstalkprey.jpg/8…
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Catstalkprey.jpg/8…
" id="IMG_2" panZoom="-18%, -5%, 116%, 87%">
<param name="id" value="3820113" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Catstalkprey.jpg" />
</img>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="2"
title="Cat&Pigeon" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Cat%26Pigeon.jpg
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Cat%26Pigeon.jpg/8…
" id="IMG_6" panZoom="-6%, -10%, 135%, 101%">
<param name="id" value="444674" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Cat&Pigeon.jpg" />
</img>
<img xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dur="0:03"
title="Cat1" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Cat1.jpg
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/Cat1.jpg/80px-Cat1…
" id="IMG_3" panZoom="-1%, -1%, 100%, 100%">
<param name="id" value="2954217" />
<param name="apiTitleKey" value="File:Cat1.jpg" />
</img>
<video xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
durationhint="6.5" dur="0:04" title="Cat claws" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Cat_claws.ogg
" poster="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Cat_claws.ogg/mid-…
" id="VIDEO_7" clipBegin="0:00">
<param name="id" value="532143" />
<param name="apiTitleKey"
value="File:Cat_claws.ogg" />
</video>
<ref xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
type="application/x-wikitemplate"
apititlekey="Template:SequenceTitleBlackBG" apiprovider="commons"
dur="2" id="REF_0">
<param name="Title" value="end title" />
</ref>
</seq>
<seq title="Audio track 1" tracktype="audio"
id="seq_3">
<audio xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/
xhtml" durationhint="1628.9262585034" dur="0:29" title="En-Cat (part
1)" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/En-Cat_%28part_1%29.ogg
" id="AUDIO_4" clipBegin="1:05">
<param name="id" value="2755934" />
<param name="apiTitleKey" value="File:En-
Cat_(part_1).ogg" />
</audio>
</seq>
</par>
</body>
</smil>
----- SNIP ----8<---------
Hi all!
I love the new Commons video editing capabilities! First let me me reiterate
what I wrote here (
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/video-labs-kaltura-html5-sequencer-av…
):
Perhaps this will finally be the breakthrough for videos on Wikipedia if
existing Commons media (esp. audio and images) can be easily combined into
educational videos with this sequencer.
Right now, there are only about 6,000 videos on Commons vs over 7 million
images (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:MIME_type_statistics), so
video content would be an obvious growth area.
I love the example video about cats created with the new sequencer! It even
leaves me wondering whether there should be a completely separate
encyplopedia project centered around such presentations. Call it
“Videopedia”. :-)
Seriously, many articles on Wikipedia–especially about history-related
subjects–have grown to such enormous proportions that, say, 5- or 10-minute
videos about the most important points of an article would be very welcome.
If you’d want to learn all the finer details you could then still read the
complete article afterwards.
My questions are related to implementation details of the
videos-as-introductions-to- / digests-of-articles concept:
1) Would it be possible to combine the sequencer with a server-side
text-to-speech system so that the timed text could be rendered as audio
automatically? The spoken versions of articles are usually quite of date and
its difficult to update the text without rerecording them. Text-to-speech
seems like an obvious solution.
2) Is there any intention of having a separate template, wiki page, or even
Wikimedia project ("videopedia.wikimedia.org" or whatever) for videos
created with the new tool? What I'm thinking is that if you have e.g. a
general video introduction about cats like the example sequence (if it were
properly expanded to be a complete little video about cats, that is),
shouldn't it either have its own page on WP or at least a very obvious link
from the article (e.g., in the infobox at the top)?
Putting it somewhere _inside_ an article seems wrong to me, because the
video would represent an _alternate_ version of the WP article, rather than
a _part_ of it. In fact, such a video would probably also cover some of the
other cat-related articles on WP to some extent, and therefore would
actually be a superset of the "Cats" article, making the question of where
to place it on WP even more problematic.
And to counter the idea that new video content can just be uploaded to
Commons and users will find it somehow even if it's not linked from WP:
According to stats.grok.se, clickthrough rates to Commons pages/categories
seem to be very low compared to the hits per day a WP article gets. I don't
know why that is, perhaps many WP readers don't know about Commons yet or
don't notice the little "Commons cat" box, but IMHO this means that
integration of new videos in WP articles* in a highly visible way* is vital
if you want people to find the content.
Martin