[Foundation-l] Open Video Alliance

[Erik Moeller]

Michael Dale & I traveled to New Haven this weekend to attend the
first meeting of the "Open Video Alliance" at Yale University:

http://openvideoalliance.org/

The meeting was sponsored and facilitated by the Open Society
Institute, Kaltura, the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Yale
ISP project. It was attended by video practitioners and technologists
who want to support open licensing & open standards for web video.
Attendees included representatives from Mozilla, Xiph.org, Kennisland,
DotSub, PCF, EFF, Creative Commons, Al Jazeera, the Berkman Center,
and many others.

Separately, Michael & I met with Kaltura to discuss the future of the
Wikimedia/Kaltura relationship.

There are four primary outcomes of the meetings:

* The OVA will work on a statement of principles regarding open video.
This is of less relevance to us since we already have a strong
commitment in this regard, but may help to convince others to use free
licenses & open standards.

* I've followed up with Anna Helme of the Engage Media project.
Together with some collaborators, Anna has compiled a great survey of
free codecs and players here:

http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/FOSS_Codecs_For_Online_Video:_Usability_Uptake_and_Development_1.2

We may want to commission her to do a similar in-depth comparison of
100% open source video editing solutions, with the ultimate goal of
helping to bootstrap one of them to be useful. If anyone is aware of
an existing survey in this regard, please let me know.

* We've followed up with Monty from Xiph and the Mozilla folks to see
if there are ways in which we can support the further development of
Theora, and the specific implementation used in Firefox 3.1.

* Regarding Kaltura, we're unlikely to further investigate any
Flash-based solutions, or any depending on proprietary codecs, but
we're discussing now whether/how Kaltura could function as a
technology partner for a 100% open video editing solution targeting
the Firefox platform. We'll be having follow-up meetings on this topic
in the near future. Meanwhile, Kaltura is continuing to sponsor
Michael Dale's initial work on exactly such a solution, and has built
a first prototype that can do basic video sequence editing in Firefox
3.1 on the basis of Ogg Theora.

I'll post further updates as things develop.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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