[Commons-l] OpenCourseware videos, video players, and more

[Samuel Klein]

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