[Foundation-l] [Spcommittee-l] Multimedia: planning a meeting

[Michael Dale]

hey guys sorry I missed the meeting on Saturday...here is an update from
the bleeding_edge ;) (cross posted to openmedia)

I think we are getting in position to make a big open media push within
the next few months. I have been chatting with the vlc folks in
particular the plugin developer (|Quovodis|) about getting some of those
more advanced features in place.(
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Ogg_Support) We focused on the
progressive download status, and what’s called a window-less plug-in so
that it could support html css/z-index layering features found in flash.
I whipped together a javascript based css styleable playhead for the vlc
plugin. A demo is available here (requires vlc-plugin):
http://metavid.ucsc.edu/bleeding_edge/test3.html .. (only the first clip
the non-annodex ogg functions with the playhead) Controlled buffering
would obviously be helpful for low bandwidth / high latency connections.

The good thing about going with VLC (in addition to or as an alternative
to our proposed integrating the libtheora into firefox is that we can
support IE and all existing audio/video media types at the same time
that our particular services are ogg-theora centric. VLC user base while
not quite on par with wikipedia is very large so it’s already dealing
with the many issues that arise in putting out audio video software
across many platforms.

We may even want to have a vlc-wikipedia-annodex/cross brand ogg theroa
only plugin that we can host on wikipedia for a few click browser
install as an alternative to the java cortado player which has not been
perfect in performance/compatibility/reliability/active development. If
a flavor of the vlc plugin was hosted on wikipedia, it could be a
limited version which only included non-patent-encumbered open source
code. (ie only decode/encode(*) the free codecs (ogg theora, speex, flac
etc) It will make the download smaller ;)

* another reason why VLC would be interesting is it already has
interfaces for hooking up to live DV sources or arbitrary live or
captured audio/video streams/files…it could be used to stream/transcode
video from client computers to the server) for example the opt to have
VLC stream to a cortado applet:
:sout=#transcode{vcodec=theo,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=vorb,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ogg,dst="/home/myuser/stream.ogg"},dst=std{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=localhost:1234}}
:sout-all
Having this javascript accessible with a clean interface could enable
arbitrary people to freely archive live streams to wiki-servers…
(wiki-conference sub-project, anyone? ;)

In the next few weeks I will continue development on the wiki/metavid
bridges and finish up on the basic version of embed media for mediaWiki.
I plan to add a metavid extension to media wiki something like
[[external_embed:]], to support video and metadata transclution into
wikispace. An (very) early version
http://metavid.ucsc.edu/wiki_dev/phase3/index.php/Metavid_embed
(msg me if you want to know how it will actually work/look)

Also I want to contact people at archive.org see what it would take to
get them on board with mod-annodex. (so that arbitrary sub-selections of
archive.org PD content could be transcluded into wikipedia or other
projects)

I am open to dialog with others about what they feel are important
short-term and long term goals. Also I would be interested in chatting
with people about how they foresee multimedia integrating into the wiki
systems. I am in #metavid in irc.freenode.net as we well as #mediaWiki
ofcourse ;) In terms of meeting times weeknight would be better for me,
as I will not be available for the next few weekends.

--michael (irc:bigmammoth)

Samuel Klein wrote:
> And again : a newer thread, prior to the discussion at the recent spc
> meetings, with gmaxwell's input:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/spcommittee-l/2006-August/000108.html
>
> Rich media is increasingly part of how people communicate and create
> new knowledge.  If we find a time to meet, perhaps we can give the OMC
> and related groups a reason to perk up...
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia#Meetings
>
> SJ
>
> On 9/5/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> There's also the recently created Open Media Coalition:
>> http://openmediacoalition.org/index.php/Main_Page
>> (open/media)
>>
>> But it seems to be inactive at this time. I've tried to give them a
>> kick in the butt on their mailing list .. ;-)
>> --
>> Peace & Love,
>> Erik
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Spcommittee-l at mail.wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/spcommittee-l
>>
>>     
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