Planet Miro

On February 25th, 2010, the Open Video Alliance is holding its first Wireside Chat, featuring Lawrence Lessig. Tune in, visit a screening event in your city, or host your own.

Our partner in Toronto, the Centre for Social Innovation, brings guests McLean Greaves (Zoomer Media), Mark Surman (executive director, Mozilla Foundation), and Brett Gaylor (director, RiP: A Remix Manifesto) together after his talk to continue the discussion about digital media and fair use. Their panel will be moderated by Qasim Virjee of Design Guru, and of course, attendees will have the chance to mingle with the panelists and each other over refreshments after the talks are over. The event begins at 5:30 and space is limited, so if you’re in the Toronto area, hurry over to their site to secure a seat.

Go to our event page to find out about more Wireside Chat locations, or drop us a line if you’d like to host a screening event in your city. Wireside Chat is made possible with support from iCommons and the Ford Foundation.

If so, you will most certainly want to take a look at Release Candidate 1 for Miro 3.0.  Miro-3.0-rc1 is now available for testing on Windows, Mac and Linux.

We have fixed about a zillion bugs and have implemented some great features such as:

• Support For Subtitles; embedded, co-located or browse toanywhere on your system.
• Item Metadata Editing; change the title, description, or audio / video specification.
• Play External Settings; global preference for all files, and a context menu for single items.

There are major speed improvements for navigating the UI, adding files to miro, and saving large search feeds.  We’ve improved shortcuts for audio playback, made some visual improvements and much, much, more.

This release also include updates to vlc (windows) and libtorrent (all os).

We are looking for help testing the release candidate, and hope you will download it and report back to us any of your findings.

To let us know how it goes, you can:

• comment here
• report a bug
• post in the forum
• email feedback@pculture.org

If you’d like to help more, please take a look at the regression tests or see the getting started guide.

As always, all help is greatly appreciated.

Today I read You can't crowdsource software. The title sums up what it's about.

I've had this experience with Miro. We occassionally get patches from non-PCF people but most of the work is done by PCF developers. We've spent a lot of time and effort over the last few years on getting more code contributors and reducing the barriers to entry. We haven't had much success.

However, there's a lot of other "stuff" that goes into developing an application and the article only focuses on code. Some of this "stuff" can be successfully crowdsourced without a lot of effort. For example, Miro crowdsources all of our strings translation work through Launchpad.

I work on another project called PyBlosxom. We have a core group of developers (right now this is me) who do the bulk of the core code work. I do some plugin work, but the bulk of the plugin work is done by users of PyBlosxom many of whom have never touched the core code. For PyBlosxom, plugin development is crowdsourced.

The article suggests that it's a waste of time to help bring new contributors come up to speed and contribute because they often don't contribute much. That conclusion really concerns me. How can we get more people helping out if we're not working on getting people to help out?

Jono Bacon wrote an article titled Project Awesome Opportunity which talks about a few projects that are reducing the barriers to contributing and making it a lot easier. It's very Launchpad-centric, though.

OpenHatch is a startup working on building the next generation of contributors and connecting contributors to projects that need help. They're wrestling with how to effectively fix these problems, but without tying the fix to a project development silo (e.g. Launchpad, GitHub, ...). I think that's really important.

I think systems like these will reduce the effort in getting contributors and make it easier to crowdsource code contribution.

And if you, dear reader, are looking for a project to help out on that's written in Python and need someone to mentor you, let me know.

February 5th, 2010: I should clarify I think the article is fine. I don't think the conclusion that code contribution doesn't crowdsource well is poorly formed or anything like that. Just that the implications suck.

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• we're really close to a release candidate now--just squaring away some issues that have popped up and letting the code bake

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• we're working on 1.0 now--probably a 4-6 week dev cycle

Ben

• Fixed bugs.
• Feeling great about 3.0.
• Has a few more things to do, but is pretty much set for 3.0 things.

Luc

• Fixed bugs for 3.0.
• Worked on testing. Started seeing memory leak issues.
• We can release even with the Perian issue as long as we mention the issue in the release notes.

Janet

• Going through testing and bugs and keeping up with changes.
• We're really close to release-candidate worthy.
• Worked on performance testing and testing on OSX--lots of performance fixes in 3.0.

Will

• Fixed bugs.

Paul

• Worked on Miro Community post 0.9 issues.
• Now working on 1.0. Looking at a 4-6 week time frame.

bugzilla

• 33 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 23 bugs marked FIXED

The National Film Board of Canada has released statistics about online viewership from the past year of its movies, which are made free to the public. The NFB uses open source software to spread and share full-length movies, animated features, documentaries, and more. Over the past year, viewers have been taking advantage of the NFB’s site and iPhone application, bringing the number of film views from 3,000 per day at the beginning of 2009 to over 20,000 per day today. The most shocking statistic—what time of day users are watching the films—seems to suggest that viewers are turning to the NFB’s offerings during what is normally television’s prime-time hours.

The 10 most popular films on the site this year (Note the running times for each film).

A Sunday at 105, (13:20) 155,183 views
The Cat Came Back, (7:41) 87,735
Carts of Darkness, (59:34) 82,230
The Log Driver’s Waltz (3:00) 71,148
The Sweater (10:21) 39,404
The Big Snit (9:54) 39,161
Ryan (13:57) 37,371
RiP! A Remix Manifesto (Chapter 1) (5:23) 37,212
Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (93:33) 34,937
How to Build an Igloo (10:32) 30,996

The NFB of Canada does pretty amazing things when it comes to bringing great films to the people. Be sure to check out their blog for exciting new updates and films.

Open video is a fundamentally global movement. In order to bring the spirit of openness to all nations and cultures, the Open Video Alliance website is being translated into as many different languages as possible. As of now, a majority of the site has been translated into español and português. These languages can be accessed by clicking the appropriate button at the upper-right side of the website.

This is a great start, but it isn’t enough! The OVA is seeking volunteers to help spread the reach of this movement by translating the site into other languages. Contact us by email for a quick interview and for further details.

Get those cameras rolling—we’re extending the Open Video in 60 Seconds contest deadline by two weeks. The last day to submit your video for a chance to win is February 14th.

Tell it to your webcam and we’ll help tell it to the world. We’ve got five excellent judges from all over the web and a bunch of cool free stuff to give away. Top prize is a trip to SXSW 2010 Interactive, runners up get a Flip Cam, and there are some t-shirts to go around too. Go to the contest page and send us your 60 second spot.

Update: Winners will be announced on Feb 16th, 2010.

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• went through P1s one by one to figure out where we were with them all
• need help testing
• shooting for a release candidate as soon as we can

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• Miro Community 0.9 was released!
• working on 1.0 now

Paul

• rolled out Miro Community 0.9 (w00t!)
• 308 Miro Communities out there
• working on 1.0 now

Janet

• split time between testing Miro Community and Miro
• working on Miro regression testing
• continued building regression tests in Eggplant

Luc

• got his Internet connection back (w00t!)
• updated overlay pallette in OSX code to display subtitle items all the time
• worked on slow first-playback issue on OSX
• reimplemented MultilineTextEntry for OSX widgets
• worked on fixing up Edit Item dialog
• tracked down Perian developers and asked about their release timeframe for 1.2.1

Ben

• worked on a ton of Miro 3.0 bugs
• working on VLC playback issues; testing out vlc bindings

Will

• reworked GStreamer playback video renderer
• did a huge pylint pass

bugzilla

• 24 bugs/feature-requests created
• 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID
• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 3 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 19 bugs marked FIXED
• 3 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

On February 25th, 2010, our first Wireside Chat kicks off with a live webcast of a talk by Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig will deliver a talk on fair use and politics in online video from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. Come in person, or tune in to a live webcast at http://openvideoalliance.org/lessig.

In conjunction with the Cambridge event, the Open Video Alliance is hosting live webcast screenings in cities around the world. Many of these screenings will be followed by special presentations. In New York, check out a curation by the ReMixed Media Festival. In Los Angeles, take part in a Critical Commons workshop. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out a live audiovisual demonstration by Eclectic Method at Stanford Law School. For more details, or to host your own event, visit http://openvideoalliance.org/lessig.

Lessig’s talk will explore copyright in a digital age, and the importance of a doctrine like fair use. Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video. As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage creative expression and political participation, not just passive consumption.

Lessig is the author of the seminal Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and many other important works. For much of his career, Professor Lessig focused his work on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. His current work addresses “institutional corruption” relationships which are legal, even currently ethical, but which weaken public trust in an institution. Lessig serves on the boards of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, Change Congress, The American Academy, Berlin, Freedom House and iCommons.org.

If you have questions or comments, or if you’d like to host your own event, please get in touch.

Here’s one of the latest submissions to our 60 second video contest. It’s a song by TheSingingNerd about fair use, creative licensing, and artistic work. We think you’ll like it:

Remember, we’re giving an expenses-paid trip to South By Southwest. Make a 60 second video and you could be on your way. We’re also giving away Flip cameras to three runners-up The deadline is around the corner (this Sunday), so watch out…

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Miro Community (0.9), which brings a host of new features and themes to the table. The software is incredibly powerful for bringing together video from all over the web into a cohesive website that can have a look and feel that suits a community or organization.

Miro Community is currently powering over 250 video sites and continues to grow—the software is free and open source and we offer hosted versions here.

A few highlights:

Enhanced Performance - Miro Community now checks for new videos from your sources more often, and we’ve made a variety of changes to make the sites run more smoothly.

New blog-like theme (”blue theme”) offers editors the ability to do blog-like commentary for video items and highlights user activity such as recent comments.

Categories hover menu in navigation bar – You no longer need to be in Category theme to have the categories accessible on the front page.

Increased Chrome Support - Site thumbnails now look crisp and clean in Chrome as well as other browsers.

Custom Themes for Premium Users – Premium users can now upload their own Django templates to the site, allowing them more flexibility in site design.

reCAPTCHA and default comment moderation – reCAPTCHA is now included on all video pages, making it much more difficult for spammers to leave comments.

Reorganized Administrative Area: We’ve pared down the administrative area to make it easier to navigate.

These are just a few of the many improvements.

To try out Miro Community, go to http://www.mirocommunity.org/signup/ and create a site today.

Spent a while figuring out how to get Miro to handle media keys in Gnome. My current understanding (and this could be entirely wrong) is that as of 2.18, Gnome handles the multimedia keys. In order for your application to respond to multimedia keys, you have to connect to the signal through dbus.

My biggest problem is that my web searching revealed a lot of bugs, but no documentation. I did finally find Handling multimedia keys in GNOME 2.18 and then worked out the rest. I still have no clue where to find the documentation for it.

Here's what I got working:

import logging
import dbus

from miro import app

class MediaKeyHandler(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.bus = dbus.Bus(dbus.Bus.TYPE_SESSION)
        self.bus_object = self.bus.get_object(
            'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon', '/org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/MediaKeys')

        self.bus_object.GrabMediaPlayerKeys(
            "Miro", 0, dbus_interface='org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.MediaKeys')

        self.bus_object.connect_to_signal(
            'MediaPlayerKeyPressed', self.handle_mediakey)

    def handle_mediakey(self, *mmkeys):
        for key in mmkeys:
            if key == "Play":
                app.widgetapp.on_play_clicked()
            elif key == "Stop":
                app.widgetapp.on_stop_clicked()
            elif key == "Next":
                app.widgetapp.on_forward_clicked()
            elif key == "Previous":
                app.widgetapp.on_previous_clicked()

def get_media_key_handler():
    try:
        return MediaKeyHandler()
    except dbus.DBusException:
        logging.exception("cannot load MediaKeyHandler")

If you see problems with this, let me know so I can ammend the code.

REMINDER: Tune into the Filmmaker Summit at slamdance.com/summit this Saturday at 11am US Mountain Time/1pm US Eastern Time (GMT -7). We’ll be exploring how the web changes the creative process, new distribution models, and more.

THIS IS NOT A MANIFESTO… It’s a survival mechanism.

By Saskia Wilson-Brown—published in the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival catalog for the WorkBook Project, Open Video Alliance and Slamdance Filmmaker Summit.

Of the 3661 feature films submitted to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, about 120 made it into the festival. Of those, 50 have no distribution as of this October. For the just about 3,500 total films submitted to Slamdance in 2008, 20 made it in to feature narrative and feature documentary competition, and 92 made it into the shorts programs. Of those features that got in, 5 got picked up for distribution. And then… What sort of distribution? Though there are some exceptions, as a general rule filmmakers are often faced with strict acquisitions deals demanding rights worldwide, across all platforms, in perpetuity… often for negligible sums of money.

The truth about the independent film world is that for the most part, the only ones that are able to sustain comfortably are the lawyers, the middle-men, and the studio execs. There are exceptions, of course, but for all the success stories that serve as models of the “what if?” there are an equivalent amount of quiet failures, films languishing in obscurity while their makers shrug and dutifully begin developing their next project.

Most filmmakers take it for granted that there is a slim chance of receiving a supported release, assuming, as artists do, that the fault is somehow theirs. In truth, this reality is more a symptom of an outdated, broken distribution system that can’t keep up with the spike in creative output than it is a testament to bad filmmaking. Though it goes without saying that some films could be better, what of the thousands of very good, relevant films that sit on the shelf? A sense of futility sets in: Since the filmmaker’s lot is to engage in public storytelling, there inevitably comes a time when we ask ourselves what the point is of spending all this money and energy creating films that end up reaching an audience of, like, 40 people. Why make films at all, if there’s such a slim chance of having them seen?

We here at Slamdance take this situation very seriously, asking ourselves a few simple and crucial questions: What role does a festival play in furthering its filmmakers’ success? In disseminating stories? In ensuring the continuation and sustenance of independent film? We suspect that if festivals have the curatorial purpose of introducing new film to new audiences, then they also need to further that by taking an active role in helping filmmakers harness audiences through new distribution and marketing methodologies — and not just by inviting acquisitions execs to the screenings. A symbiotic and self-empowered relationship needs to form in order for all to survive — one that is built firmly OUTSIDE of the permission-based system in which we currently work.

With all this in mind, this year Slamdance has teamed up with the WorkBook Project and the Open Video Alliance to present the first ever Filmmaker Summit.

From the Summit release, as drafted by Lance Weiler & Peter Baxter:

“The mission of the Filmmaker Summit is to jointly craft a new charter for filmmaking, storytelling and content distribution, with and by the global filmmaking community. Born out of reaction to an independent film industry in a state of turmoil, the summit aims to explore how a global filmmaking community can better understand new DIY distribution strategies, and work towards the democratization of new technologies, tools, story-telling techniques, and processes. We believe that sustainable independent filmmaking is no longer just about production. Instead it is about the ways in which filmmakers must expand their roles and take charge of reaching and engaging worldwide audiences, across all viewing platforms. The topics to be explored at the summit are set through crowd-sourced methodologies (topics voted on and suggested by the independent film community). During the summit itself we will be hearing from filmmakers and strategists from around the world, chiming in on new marketing and distribution techniques they have employed to get their content made and distributed.”

Slamdance believes that we need to help our filmmakers sustain by supporting the self-empowerment inherent in self-distribution. Though this emerging methodology is still, largely, theoretical, we believe that we can all find some working models, together.

It’s been a very interesting two days, with both YouTube and Vimeo rolling out experimental HTML5 players. But the Vimeo announcement, which comes the same day as the Firefox 3.6 release, isn’t a panacea for advocates of open video. As with YouTube, the HTML5-delivered videos use the H.264 codec—so they won’t play natively in Firefox and other browsers that haven’t paid for permission to use the codec.

Unlike the HTML5 experiments at DailyMotion, which deliver Theora videos, these two experiments are using the industry standard H.264. Though great for the open web, and certainly threatening for makers of proprietary plug-ins, these developments give strength to H.264 as the plays-anywhere-on-any-device solution for the web. The upshot? As HTML5 and the tag become pervasive, the possibility of an even diverse video ecosystem emerges. As with images on the web, with support for .jpg, .png, and any other number of formats, the adoption of HTML5 draws us closer to a more multimedia-rich web, with unimaginable applications.

I keep seeing people say things like, "I'm not a programmer, so I can't help."

I think this is a common misconception about Free Software. Free Software empowers you. Let me say that again...

Free Software EMPOWERS You.

Miro is a Free Software project and like all Free Software projects, there are a variety of ways that you can be involved. By being involved you are taking the responsibility to help solve your own problems.

You can test nightly builds and release candidates.

You can submit bugs and help us triage and fix them.

You can send in patches. Patches can be for code, documentation, packaging, ...

You can package Miro for other distributions.

You can translate strings.

You can tell your friends and family about Miro and help them get setup. You can blog about Miro. You can dent about Miro.

You can adopt a line of code. This helps fund ongoing development. If we had more funds, we could have more paid developers.

Miro is built and maintained by all of us working together contributing our time and resources. There are features to be implemented, bugs to be squashed, systems and software to integrate with, standards to develop--the future is great with possibilities. There's a lot of stuff that can be done and you can help the Miro community do it.

YouTube has announced HTML5 support, which is still in testing. By building player controls in HTML5 and leaving video playback to the browser, users can enjoy video without loading resource-intensive and proprietary software like Flash. This is a big step for open video: YouTube is far and away the #1 video site on the web, and Google’s support of open web standards will help accelerate the pace of adoption.

The feature must be enabled in YouTube’s TestTube interface. Once enabled, most videos that don’t have advertising and videos without annotations will show up in an HTML5-based player.

While YouTube’s support of HTML5 is a great development, it’s only part of the equation for open video. Its’s still important that video is served using royalty-free codecs (like Theora, for example). YouTube is able to easily flip the switch on an HTML5 player because it has already done the legwork of transcoding its library of videos to H.264—it serves these files to Android phones, iPhones, Apple TVs, and a number of other embedded devices, and now to web browsers. H.264 is an advanced codec with substantial support in the marketplace, but though it is a standard, it cannot be used freely. Manufacturers and software developers must pay a license fee to integrate it with their products. Thus, HTML5 video on YouTube will only work out of the box in Chrome (which has built-in support for h.264) and Safari (which has built in support via Quicktime). HTML5 video won’t work natively in Firefox because Mozilla doesn’t pay a license fee for H.264. And it won’t work natively on any device that isn’t properly licensed—as we’ve previously written, these license requirements severely inhibit growth and innovation of video on the web.

But Google should be applauded for taking this major step to make video on the web more open. In the meantime, Firefox and Opera users can install VLC or Quicktime to play HTML5-enabled YouTube video, and Internet Explorer users can install Google ChromeFrame.

All eyes are now on Google, which is contentiously negotiating its acquisition of codec developer On2. Will Google open source On2’s VP8 codec codebase?

On the dev conference call today we talked about how many things have been fixed, changed, implemented, et al in the Miro 2.6 development cycle. We decided this isn't a .1 improvement--it should get it's own major version number.

As such, we're changing the version number for the next version of Miro from 2.6 to 3.0.

The effects of this are pretty small--it's just a name change. However, our Bugzilla Roadmap urls are specific to a version.

Instead of using:

http://bugzilla.pculture.org/roadmap.cgi?product=Miro&target=2.6

Use this:

http://bugzilla.pculture.org/roadmap.cgi?product=Miro&target=3.0

Many users let their voices be heard on Google’s product ideas page for YouTube, demanding that Google switch to HTML5 standards, make Flash a fallback, reform their copyright policies to be more fair use friendly, and more. People have turned up in droves to let YouTube know that openness is important to all of us.

To those who insisted on YouTube’s supporting of HTML5 and Ogg Theora, Google responded:

We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.

It isn’t too late to vote these ideas up or add your own ideas. Head over to the product ideas page and join the push for a more open YouTube!

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• went through the last P1 bugs one by one
• need more outside testing
• shooting for a release candidate next week
• renaming to Miro 3.0

Miro Community 0.9 status (roadmap)

• 0.9 will get released monday (new themes, new awesome, ...)
• almost there.... doing bug fixes now

Janet

• spent time regression testing on Windows and OSX
• worked on subtitle support tests
• worked on eggplant tests
• planning to work on Miro Community 0.9 testing for the rest of the week

Ben

• worked on getting external subtitle files working with vlc
• working on other vlc quirkiness
• worked on some other stuff

Will

• synced translations, finished up dependency upgrades on Windows, fixed gst_extractor, fixed moviedata_util, fixed a bunch of little bugs, added tests, peer reviewed code, updated copyright dates, upgraded to libtorrent 0.14.8, did some bug triage, and implemented most of the item edit dialog.
• has a week or two of work left on Miro 3.0

Paul

• worked on the last feature bits for 0.9
• working on bug fixes now--almost done

bugzilla

• 26 bugs/feature-requests created
• 21 bugs marked FIXED
• 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 3 bugs marked INVALID

Tomorrow night, IndiePix, PBS, and Definitive Jux Records are having a DVD Release Party in Brooklyn for their upcoming film, Copyright Criminals. The film, created by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, explores the legal, monetary, and cultural implications of sampling by exploring the history of hip hop, both old and new.

The party, which will be held at the Brooklyn Bowl, begins at 8pm and will feature appearances by El-P, DJ Spooky, and Eclectic Method. It’ll be followed by the 10pm premiere of the film on PBS.

For more features, including interactive timelines, behind the scenes videos, and discussion guides, check out the Copyright Criminals website. Take a peek at Eclectic Method’s trailer for the event:

minutes

Miro 2.6 status (roadmap)

• Waiting on Perian fix.
• Getting close to feature freeze.

Miro Community 0.9 status (roadmap)

• Developing is coming along very nicely.

Janet

• Worked on regression testing, found some issues which were fixed.
• Working on building automated tests with Eggplant.

Luc

• Worked on issues for 2.6.
• Followed Ben's footsteps. Fixed mediatype checking working, sidebar update indicators, and some other things.
• Worked on sidebar scrollbar issues.
• Working on connecting subtitle files with items.
• Most recent bugs are taking a lot longer.

Will

• Had a crummy week.
• Fixed some issues, but didn't get much of what he wanted done.

Ben

• Implemented media type checking.
• Animated the update indicator in the sidebar.
• Fixed the Windows shutdown crash bug.
• Totally awesome performance fixes.
• Fixed a bunch of other issues.

Paul

• Implemented editor comments.
• Worked on flat pages.
• Worked on Miro Community 0.9 stuff--it's coming along nicely.

bugzilla

• 26 bugs/feature-requests created
• 11 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID

Want to help the online video community move in a more user friendly, open direction? Google has started up a dialogue about YouTube’s future in their Product Ideas forum. We’re pleased to see many of the comments include requests for open video support through Ogg Theora and HTML5. These features would expand our possibilities for sharing, collaborating, and innovating through video on the web with free and open source technologies leading the way.

This is a welcome opportunity to voice support for open standards. Visit Google’s “Product Ideas for Youtube” to submit your own suggestions and vote on the issues that you care about.

A year and a half ago, developer Jonathan Thomas set out to create a stable, functional non-linear video editor for Linux. This week, Thomas released version 1.0 of OpenShot Video Editor. The open-source software is full of great features, from video transitions to rotoscoping support to many advanced customizations, and has been receiving a lot of glowing feedback. The easy access to great, new, generative software such as this will hopefully lower many barriers, monetary and technical, allowing amateurs and budding professionals to try their hand in creating amazing videos.

New community Womoz (Women & Mozilla) solicits videos about women and FLOSS for their Miro Community powered video site. Check it out and submit some videos!

From the Womoz blog:

The Women & Mozilla Video Website is live and you can help it grow!

We’ve recently added a video website to our WoMoz project tools. This Website has been created mainly in order to:

• give everyone access to online video tutorials about Free Software and Mozilla
• publish interviews of women contributors and portray their outstanding work inside FLOSS communities
• display video content about the women in computer science / FLOSS subject
• publish existing conferences done by women in FLOSS and IT

You can all help by uploading video content onto this new site!

If you feel like a video makes sense in regard to the list above, please feel free to submit it directly from the site’s main Home page. (no account necessary to upload videos, just click the “Submit A Video” button and a site administrator will approve them).

The band Nine Inch Nails, a noted example of a major artist using Creative Commons licenses for their latest music, recently witnessed the awesome results of opening up their materials to their fans. Last year, for their Light Up The Sky tour, the group could not create their own concert video, so they decided to release over 400 gb of high quality footage to the public. What came next was astounding, but not surprising. Fans, given this creative freedom, edited the videos, created their own works, screened their productions, and put together extremely well done packages. What may be the most notable was released last month: Another Version of the Truth: The Gift created by a group called This One Is On Us. This 1080p 5.1 film, which took over a year and many collaborators to create, features the entire concert and has been released in a bunch of different formats—big and small.

Rob Sheridan, art director for the band, had this to say:

This is yet another example of a devoted fanbase and a policy of openness combining to fill in blanks left by old media barriers. The entire NIN camp is absolutely thrilled that treating our fans with respect and nurturing their creativity has led to such an overwhelming outpour of incredible content, and that we now have such a high quality souvenir from our most ambitious tour ever.

This isn’t the first time Nine Inch Nails has supported openness and has essentially departed from old media methods. Their concerts have “open camera” policies, where fans can film and upload videos without fear of legal repercussions. This too has led to fans splicing and editing amateur clips to form full length concert videos—a feat that, at this scale, is pretty much unprecedented.

Photo by kevitra on flickr

Participatory Culture Foundation is looking for a designer. A top-notch portfolio is essential, we need somebody who knows HTML/CSS, and some javascript knowledge is a plus.

This is for a new PCF project that will let communities of users subtitle any video on the web. You’ll be responsible for web design and branding, and probably a lot of fun user interface design as well. Send samples to nicholas (a) pculture.org.

On January 23rd, Open Video Alliance will co-present the Filmmaker Summit at the Slamdance Film Festival. The mission of the Filmmaker Summit is to jointly craft a new charter for filmmaking, storytelling and content distribution, with and by the global filmmaking community.

Summit speakers include Peter Baxter (founder of Slamdance and filmmaker); directors Steven Soderbergh and Jamie King; Brian Newman (CEO Tribeca Film Institute); and Lance Weiler (filmmaker and founder of WorkBook Project), among others. The Summit will run in real-time in Park City and online at slamdance.com/summit. You can also tune in from home, and a number of institutions (including USC and Columbia University) will be offering live screenings. To register, and for more details, check out slamdance.com/summit. Registration is 100% free.

The really interesting part, though, is that OVA and the WorkBook Project are inviting you to set the agenda for the summit. Check out discussion.workbookproject.com to participate in a broad discussion about the future of independent media and filmmaking.

The Filmmaker Summit is a reaction to an independent film industry that is currently in turmoil—how can the global filmmaking community better understand the web? What opportunities are afforded by new technology and democratization of new tools and processes? Sustainable independent filmmaking is no longer about the production alone: instead, it’s about how filmmakers must take charge of reaching and engaging worldwide audiences across all viewing platforms.

We continue to embrace the democratization of media technology as an empowering force for filmmakers around the world. Stay tuned for more details on the Summit and how to participate as the festival draws nearer.

The Summit is co-organized by the Workbook Project, Slamdance, and OVA, with the generous support of IndieFlix, XMission, and Flumotion.

Remember Eclectic Method from the OVC 2009 afterparty? This weekend is your chance to catch them again, if you’re in New York City.

Come out for a night of dancing, music, and visual awesomeness as NYC WTF hosts another event this Saturday, January 9 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Le Chev, Eclectic Method, and Faux Mex will be performing in the Back Room at Public Assembly from 10 pm to 4 am.

Tickets are $10 at the door and $7 in advance. RSVP on Facebook today for a sweet two-for-one ticket deal.

minutes

Miro 2.6 status (roadmap)

• Ben landed a ton of awesome performance fixes.
• Will worked on fixing unit tests and getting unit tests to pass on Windows.
• Development is progressing nicely.

Miro Community 0.9 status (roadmap)

• Paul is working diligently on it.

Janet

• worked on tests Miro Community
• worked on tests for getmiro.com
• started working with Eggplant to writing automation tests for Miro but ran into a problem with text recognition
• went through the regression tests with Miro and only found a few issues

Will

• working on the Windows build box and trying to figure out why it hangs at night like a naughty naughty machine
• spent serious quality time with unit tests; more to do, though

Luc

• working on small irritating bugs that are hard to reproduce and some of them seem to work fine (i.e. no bug)
• working on support for connecting subtitle files to videos
• talked with Perian folks and they fixed the bug Luc submitted; we're waiting on the next version of Perian

Paul

• was on vacation most of last week
• working on Miro Community 0.9 things

bugzilla

• 11 bugs/feature-requests created
• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 2 bugs marked INVALID
• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 4 bugs marked FIXED
• 2 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

This was a pretty big year for the Miro project and the first year for the Miro Community project. In Miro-land, we pushed out Miro 2.0 which was a complete re-write of the user interface. Then we pushed out Miro 2.5 which was a rewrite of the storage/database layer. We also switched from svn to git. That's three really big changes for a single project in one year.

Miro 2.5 was a messy release and we've made a bunch of changes so we don't have to go through that again. We've been spending time on the unit test, QA automation, and code quality for Miro 2.6. We've changed the release process so that it buffers more time to catch issues. We're doing more peer review of complex code changes. The switch to git will help since branching and merging are much easier and less error-prone.

Bugzilla stats:

Overall statistics
------------------
                                  2007  2008  2009
Opened reports at end of year:     453   705  1102
Opened:                           4052  1625  1593
Closed:                           4368  2032  1654
Users created:                     644  1083   771
Comments created:                13564  7529  8329

"Opened reports at end of year" is the total number of opened bugs at the end of that year. So at the end of 2007, we had 453 open bugs. At the end of 2008, we had 705 open bugs, ...

I wasn't sure whether to include 2007 or not since half way through that year we switched from Trac to Bugzilla. No one needed to create an account in Trac, so user numbers should be lower. Also, we were getting a lot of Trac spam, so comment, opened and closed numbers were much higher.

Bugs closed by activity:
------------------------
             2007  2008  2009
fixed         736   932   969
invalid       170   133    85
wontfix        35   142    71
duplicate     139   313   190
worksforme    169   344   151
incomplete      0    57    84

I thought this was an interesting data set.

The INCOMPLETE status was added mid-2008. We use this for whenever we ask a user for some information that we need to work on a bug and the user never gets back to us. It's better than marking it as INVALID or WORKSFORME since it's easier to find this set of bugs that were pushed to the side because need more information.

We're fixing on average 3 bugs a day--that's pretty impressive.

Top 10 bug reporters:
--------------------
   444 - Janet (PCF)
   183 - Anne Jonas (PCF)
    71 - Will Kahn-Greene (PCF)
    71 - Dean Jansen (PCF)
    42 - Nicholas Reville (PCF)
    39 - sg
    37 - Keith Lard
    28 - Uwe Hermann
    28 - Ben Dean-Kawamura (PCF)
    22 - Pan  ~ dietmar

Out of 1593 bugs, PCF employees reported 839--that's just over half. Of the non-PCF people in this list, Uwe is the Debian packager for Miro and Pan is an OpenSUSE packager for Miro. sg and Keith Lard both run OSX.

Top 10 bug closers:
------------------
   421 - Janet (PCF)
   369 - Paul Swartz (PCF)
   353 - Will Kahn-Greene (PCF)
   195 - Ben Dean-Kawamura (PCF)
   114 - Luc Heinrich (PCF)
    26 - Christopher Webber (PCF)
    21 - Dean Jansen (PCF)
    20 - sg
    19 - Anne Jonas (PCF)
    14 - Nicholas Reville (PCF)

Top 10 bug commenters:
---------------------
  2050 - Janet (PCF)
  1757 - Will Kahn-Greene (PCF)
   823 - Paul Swartz (PCF)
   533 - Ben Dean-Kawamura (PCF)
   354 - Anne Jonas (PCF)
   254 - Nicholas Reville (PCF)
   234 - Dean Jansen (PCF)
   187 - Luc Heinrich (PCF)
    98 - sg
    88 - Uwe Hermann 

Git stats

Moving along, I can now get stats out of our git repository. git ftw!

In 2009, we did 11 releases (22 releases if you include release candidates) of which 2 were MASSIVE code overhaul releases. Miro 2.0 involved a re-write of the user interface using native widgets which resulted us in dropping 4,000 files from the codebase (a large portion of that was probably locale-related). Miro 2.5 involved a re-write of the database layer. We had a lot of bug fix releases to stabilize things after these two big releases.

Between Miro 1.0 and 1.1: 1606 files changed, 127775 insertions(+), 14605 deletions(-)

Between Miro 1.1 and 1.2: 2318 files changed, 233370 insertions(+), 185511 deletions(-)

Between Miro v1.2 and v2.0: 4715 files changed, 271506 insertions(+), 560366 deletions(-)

Between Miro v2.0 and v2.5: 662 files changed, 169258 insertions(+), 175292 deletions(-)

Half of the 2.0 work and all of the 2.5 work was done in 2009. 2.0 was clearly a monumental release like no other release we've ever done.

In 2009, we did 1,382 commits. For comparison, we did 2,049 commits in 2008. The bulk of the work for Miro 2.0 was done at the end of 2008--I think that accounts for the large discrepancy here.

Contributor stats

I don't have stats for testing contributions or translation contributions so I can't speak to those. I can only speak to patches and bug triage contributions.

In 2009, we had 19 contributed fixes/features. PCF employees are doing the bulk of the work. This is still an area we could use help with.

In 2009, we've done a lot to lower the barriers to entry and make this easier: improved code quality, wrote documentation, improved build documentation, improved build scripts, added unit tests, ... In 2010, we're continuing this work.

Summary

Despite the Miro 2.5 release which was pretty rocky, I think we had a really good year and got a lot accomplished. I'm looking forward to Miro 2.6 (or whatever the next release gets called).

I'd love to see more contributions from other people. If you have some free time or some passion and want to help out, let me know. If you don't have free time, but have some spare change floating around, please donate--this helps PCF pay for employees to work on Miro.

minutes

Miro 2.6 status (roadmap)

• it's coming along

Miro Community 0.9 status (roadmap)

• it's coming along

Paul

• working towards the 0.9 Miro Community release
• tweaking the Windows installer and trying out another installer partner

Luc

• fixing browser-related issues
• working on more Miro 2.6 bugs

Will

• updated the binary kits to libtorrent 0.14.7
• spent time looking at sphinx-gsoc2009 to see if it was usable for a Miro User Manual--it's not

Janet

• working on Miro Community testing
• started to do performance comparisons between Miro 2.5.4 and what's in master after Ben's and Will's performace fixes
• got a license for Eggplant for Miro interface testing

Ben

• worked on performance work that makes things a lot faster for certain operations
• has one additional thing to check in performance wise

bugzilla

• 4 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 7 bugs marked FIXED

notes

We're working on Miro 2.6 targeted bugs. If there are issues that should be targeted for 2.6, let us know. If there's anything you can help with either by adding information or contributing patches to any of the bugs targeted for Miro 2.6, please do!

Below is a heads up on two conferences PCF recommends checking out!

Making Your Media Matter is put on by American University’s Center for Social Media, and the Media that Matters Film Festival, put on by Arts Engine, is calling for video submissions. See their announcements below.
—

Making Your Media Matter

Washington, D.C., Feb 11-12, 2010

Join established and aspiring filmmakers, non-profit communications leaders, funders and students working to learn and share cutting-edge practices to make their media matter, February 11th and 12th 2010 at American University in Washington DC. This year marks the Center for Social Media’s sixth annual Making Your Media Matter conference. Visit the Center’s website to view partners and sponsors www.centerforsocialmedia.org/mymm and sign on to the social networking site www.makingyourmediamatter.ning.com. Registration $100, Students, $50. Register now!

MYMM is presented in partnership with the Media That Matters Festival, which is a project of Arts Engine, Inc.

–

Media That Matters 10

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS!

Deadline: January 22, 2010

Media That Matters: Screen. Act. Impact.

Arts Engine celebrates ten years of Media That Matters — the premier
showcase for short films with big messages.

“We no longer have to rely on major corporations for things to be seen — we have Media that Matters to distribute new material and new voices and new points of view.”
— Tim Robbins, Actor

Submit your film for the chance to work with us in creating social
change through film. If selected, your film will take become a part of
Media That Matters — an international, multi-platform campaign
streaming and playing to thousands of people at screenings across the
globe. Media That Matters creates discussion guides and screening
materials to promote conversation and encourage educators, activists
and organizers alike to Take Action around these films. Join us in our
TENTH year and submit your film now!
http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/submit

CRITERIA:

* Short films — the shorter the better—no longer than 12 minutes
max, but 8 and under would be great!
* Social issues — Any and all issues will be considered. This year
we are focusing on Media Literacy, Human Rights, LGBTQ & Sexual
Identity, Youth Activism and International issues in particular.
* The film should encourage the audience to be engaged and take
action around the issue.
* All genres — Documentary, animation, public service announcement,
narrative, music video, drama, comedy. Creativity is encouraged — but
your film must focus on a social issue.
* Open to all ages — Youth-produced projects encouraged!

The Cosmonaut is a crowdfunded feature film project that is making waves among audiences and the filmmaking community alike. The part sci-fi, part love story from Spain’s Riot Cinema tells the story of a Russian cosmonaut who transmits mysterious messages back to Earth after he disappears during a space mission. Already, the film is reaching more viewers than one-fifth of all films produced in Spain last year. Here’s the surprise: it hasn’t even been released yet. When completed, it will be released for free, online, in HD, under a Creative Commons license that allows anybody to distribute it, copy it, and remix it.

The producers’ experiments with new modes of funding, producing, and distributing the film are pretty ingenious. In addition to an unconventional storyline, the filmmakers are experimenting with a transparent creation process and a world of experiences that encourage and reward audience participation at every step of the way. From becoming a producer of the film and getting a spot in the credits, to limited edition merchandise like DVD editions, t-shirts, or a copy of the rare book that helped inspire the story, there is no shortage of cool ways to get involved or goodies to take home. Not to mention, there are numerous opportunities to have your own material make it into the premiere release version of the film.

“All of us were each fans of Creative Commons,” says director Nicolás Alcalá. “I was discovering crowd funding a year ago and started to look at projects like A Swarm of Angels and others… It was like saying, in a way, how could we ask our friends for money to make our movie? It turned out to be a good way to ask our friends, and their friends, and their friends, and use the internet to be able to rise a community around it. It ended up being bigger than we thought and the story needed to be bigger. That’s when we started putting pieces together and taking the best parts of each project, of crowdfunding, of Creative Commons. Even in this time, the seven months since we launched the project, we’ve changed a lot of things because we’ve been learning a lot and discovering how to do it better.”

The producers are also planning to tie the film in with a range of web-connected services. Bruno Teixidor, creative director, adds, “We are developing an alternate reality game (ARG) and some transmedia projects, and that should be great for community because it’s giving it life, actually.” These upcoming projects include collaborations with The Auteurs, Safe Creative, and Purefold.

The Cosmonaut shows some of the ways that artists are adapting and thriving by embracing creative business models. This approach takes advantage of the strengths of the internet: increased participation and unprecedented opportunities for low-cost distribution. It also helps make the filmmaking process more inclusive—and for the final product to be released free to the public. Moreover, in addition to support from esteemed contributors including artist Joan Fontcuberta, free software pioneer Richard Stallman, Creative Commons advocate Cory Doctorow, and retired space explorers, the team has also been fortunate to have advice from other filmmakers in an industry that takes notice of success amidst a time of uncertain transition. Breaking the mold isn’t easy, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“It’s very important for us to open the doors to anybody, from whatever country, if they like what we’re doing, to feel welcome and become a part of it.” says producer Gabriela Lendo. Check out Cosmonaut headquarters, consider getting involved, and stay tuned to hear more from us about The Cosmonaut and the folks behind it.

Internet TV continued to mature in December as Boxee unveiled the Boxee beta and a Boxee-branded set top box. Meanwhile, the FCC may take another look at cable set-top boxes amidst concerns of a continued monopoly and anti-competitive business practices.

At an event in Brooklyn last week, Boxee showcased their newest beta software, currently available to early subscribers on the way to a full public beta release on January 7th. The basic idea behind Boxee is to maximize user choice in what to watch, how to watch it, and when. Boxees pulls a broad spectrum of content into a managable and customizable interface, aggregating from various internet sources and personal media collections. Along with the beta, Boxee announced a partnership with D-Link to manufacture the Boxee Box, a dedicated hardware device, expected to hit stores next year. Boxee is expected to license its software to various other consumer electronics device manufacturers as well.

The maturation of Internet TV software like Boxee signals a shift to a more distributed media environment. However, bridging the gap between television and online media is a difficult proposition, not least because traditional content producers are slow to embrace these services. Boxee has tried to bring shows from Hulu into the service, but—as Brad Stone writes—”[the] networks do not want people to receive the Web videos on their TVs, instead of watching actual broadcasts, which carry more valuable advertising. As a result, Hulu has largely blocked Boxee from adding its videos.” There remains a slightly less elegant workaround to view Hulu content through Boxee’s web browser, but the active blocking of clients like Boxee is indicative of the hurdles in this emerging market.

In the wake of the proposed NBC/Comcast merger, and a renewed commitment by the FCC to re-examine competition and innovation in the industry, the tension between content producers and firms like Boxee will likely continue to grow. Cable companies have long enjoyed a practical monopoly on the way subscribers are able to access content, and there is no competitive market for cable boxes. Marvin Ammori of Free Press does an excellent job outlining the numerous cable industry techniques to potentially slow the transition to open internet based television alternatives. A new wave of competition makes it more likely for consumers to cut the cord—and their subscriptions—to cable.

The relationship between internet and cable service providers, content owners, and innovative start-ups like Boxee will be interesting to watch in 2010. If these disruptive technologies can successfully penetrate the market, and the FCC solidifies steps toward net neutrality and against the cable lobby, we could see a shift in how people watch TV. We could also see a shift in the kind of content they choose to watch. While “traditional” TV still accounts for 99% of all video viewing in the U.S., the popularity of services like Boxee could be a boon to independent and web-centric producers.

minutes

2.6 status (roadmap)

• talked about release planning
• subtitle support almost done
• we want to continue working on performance issues

Janet

• acquiring eggplant for testing
• regression testing on miro master
• tested miro community 0.8.5

Luc

• working on 2.6 bugs

Will

• worked on and submitted the PSF grant
• worked on 2.6 bugs
• doing a pylint pass on the codebase and working on code quality issues
• almost done the subtitle menu changes for linux and windows

Ben

• working on performance issues that happen when doing things with multiple items
• other 2.6 work

Paul

• released miro community 0.8.5 on friday afternoon (miro community 0.8.5 release announcement)
• working on miro community 0.9 (roadmap) with better theme support and other things

bugzilla

• 9 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 12 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID
• 2 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

notes

We're working on Miro 2.6 targeted bugs. If there are issues that should be targeted for 2.6, let us know. If there's anything you can help with either by adding information or contributing patches to any of the bugs targeted for Miro 2.6, please do!

Miro Community 0.8.5 has been released!

Version 0.8.5 has some exciting new features and has cleaned up some bugs both above and below the surface. Some of the changes include:

*Updated Category Pages – You can now see a list of subcategories within a category, and see all videos in a category in chronological order, regardless of subcategory.

*Updated Submission Process - We’ve worked to make the video submission process a little smoother, by adding some explanatory text and breaking up the process. We’ve also added the opportunity for those submitting a video to leave their email address so that administrators can contact them with any questions, or just know where the videos are coming from. Users should be aware that if a user is logged in, Miro Community will automatically record which videos they are submitting.

*Guiding Signs for new sites – There are now cards for newly created sites that lead you through setting up your Miro Community site.

*Automatic User Creation – When videos are submitted to the site from YouTube, blip.tv, or Vimeo, a user is now automatically created based on the username of the video host, allowing users to track videos by a certain user across sites, whether they’re individually submitted or added via a feed. If these users want to access the Miro Community site, you only need to add a password for their account.

*Date Listing Option – You can now choose to have videos dated by the time they were submitted to the Miro Community site, instead of the time they were posted online. This option is available on the Design Settings page.

*Get Notified of New Videos – By popular request, we have added the option to email admins when there are new items in your queue, and/or when a new video is submitted by a user. You can find this option on the Design Settings page. Be aware that all administrators/Super Users will receive an email if this option is checked. There are also RSS feeds available for submitted items and items in your review queue, the links for which are available through the To Be Reviewed page.

*Increased Ogg Theora Support – Miro Community has always supported Ogg Theora (as one of the founders of the Open Video Alliance, we’re very committed to it!), but we’ve added a few extra pieces of support, including notifications on Ogg Theora videos in unsupportive browsers.

We’ve also fixed a variety of bugs and continue to work hard behind the scenes to support all the great Miro Community sites that are flourishing!

So, if you could change or improve one thing about Miro Community, what would it be?

As always, please feel free to email me with any questions about your Miro Community site at anne[a]pculture.org. You can find out more about Miro Community at http://www.mirocommunity.org, and take a look at the code itself at https://git.participatoryculture.org/localtv.

We've been working on subtitle support for Miro in the subtitle branch. Yesterday, Ben merged the changes into the master branch. As of this morning, nightly builds have subtitle support. Yay!

There are still a few things to implement and the code hasn't had much of a chance to settle. Also, there are still some things I think should get refactored and it's likely we'll be tweaking the interface going forward as we use it more.

Still, it's good to have landed the bulk of this feature. It's probably not wildly useful yet, but it gives us some ground work towards building better subtitle distribution/creation infrastructure going forward.

The upcoming Slamdance film festival will be home to the Filmmaker Summit, a groundbreaking event co-organized by the Open Video Alliance featuring Steven Soderbergh, Lance Weiler, and many others.

The mission of the WorkBook Project / Slamdance / Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit is to jointly craft a new charter for filmmaking, storytelling and content distribution, with and by the global filmmaking community.

Our collaboration is born out of reaction to an independent film industry currently in a state of turmoil and how, as a global filmmaking community, we can better understand and find greater success afforded by new technology and democratization of new tools and processes. We believe sustainable independent filmmaking is no longer about the production itself. Instead, it’s about how filmmakers must now expand their role and take charge of reaching and engaging worldwide audiences across all viewing platforms.

The summit is being produced in a three-act structure: Pre-summit participatory agenda-setting; on the ground event in Park City with Steven Soderbergh, guest speakers from around the world in dialogue with attendees; post-summit collaboration in publishing and marketing the fruits of the dialogue.

We continue to embrace the democratization of media technology as an empowering force for filmmakers around the world. Stay tuned for more details on the Summit and how to participate as the January 2010 festival draws nearer.

Filmmaker Arin Crumley, known for co-directing the film “Four Eyed Monsters,” and Kieran Masterton have launched OpenIndie, a website dedicated to helping up-and-coming filmmakers out. The open-source site helps creators figure out where there is demand for their movie, leading to a smarter approach to film distribution.

The site builds on the experience of “Four Eyed Monsters,” where the filmmakers screened the movie based on requests online to watch it. Filmmakers can input fan email lists and zip codes to help collaborate on upcoming film screenings. Users can browse films, note which ones they want to see, and request screenings in their area—or organize their own. They can then share the revenue with the filmmakers. With the current media landscape, being an independent filmmaker is tough, and sites like OpenIndie that foster innovative and democratic dissemination and business models seem to cause much excitement.

The site has already completed a Kickstarter campaign to raise $10,000 to help fund the site; after just one month, they had raised over $12,000 from over 200 supporters. Their next campaign is to raise money to fund OpenLicense, a way for filmmakers to set guidelines on monetizing their screenings and merchandise.

minutes

2.6 status (roadmap)

• subtitle work is almost done
• lots of bugs to work on, but some might have been fixed in 2.5.4--Janet is going to retest
• lots of little bugs to work on left--we could use the help if anyone is interested in contributing!

Paul

• Worked on Miro Community 0.8.5. It's pretty close to done--there are two outstanding bugs.
• Hoping to push out Miro Community 0.8.5 out in the next few days. Lots of bug fixes, cool new administration stuff.
• After that, there are a few big bugs for 0.9 to work on.

Janet

• Worked on getting 2.5.4 out. Looks like it's been a good release with few complaints.
• Working on figuring out the shutdown crash for Miro on Windows. This has been difficult and very trial-and-error.
• Worked on Miro Community testing.

Ben

• Worked with Janet on that shutdown crash.

Luc

• Worked on Miro 2.6 issues from bugzilla. Just kind of going through and cherry-picking easy issues and nasty issues.

Will

• Pushed out 2.5.4.
• Worked on menu refactoring.
• Worked on subtitles stuff.

bugzilla

• 10 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 3 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked INVALID

Comcast, the largest cable company in the United States, has recently announced that it will acquire a 51% stake in NBC Universal, one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world. This will give Comcast control over the creation and dissemination of content to a huge portion of the US, an example of potentially anticompetitive vertical integration.

This act of consolidation has many open media activists on edge, citing antitrust issues and threats to democracy. When a single company owns news channels, cable suppliers, and internet providers, the threat of censorship or unfair practices increases.

“If Comcast controls content, they could in theory, depending on the legal framework, raise their prices for their competitors,” said Marvin Ammori, advisor to the group Free Press, who recently wrote a piece about the merger in the Huffington Post. Now that a service provider will be able to charge higher rates to competitors, including other cable networks and satellite TV providers, prices could rise for consumers and competition could be stifled. Free Press recently released their own white paper (PDF) and website dedicated to blocking the merger.

The potential for bundling content and distribution while raising prices for the competition has prompted the government to step in. The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department are examining the effects of the merger. Even congressmen, including Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, are worried about the anticompetitive implications of the merger. Comcast, however, assures that the deal is “pro-competitive, pro-consumer, and strongly in the public interest.”

With the merger comes potential threats to online video. Being the biggest cable internet provider, Comcast has a financial incentive to favor its own content (like NBC’s programming) over others’, raising network neutrality issues. This gives proponents of peer-to-peer and open video reason for unease, too. In the past, Comcast was reprimanded by the FCC for blocking peer-to-peer applications, like BitTorrent and Miro. Now that video is becoming more ubiquitous, the cable company may aim to stifle participation and user-generated video in favor of the streaming of its own content. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Comcast will also get NBC’s 27% stake in Hulu, one of the largest online television distributors. Hulu, which offers many television shows for free, is often seen as a check to cable companies. As a recent editorial in The New York Times notes, “Comcast could well see such services as a threat and bundle them with cable services or abandon them entirely.”

The merger also comes relatively soon after Comcast announced its internet television service, TV Everywhere, which gives on demand television access solely to Comcast cable subscribers. TV Everywhere, which will be released this month, is a prime example of the “incumbent media,” as Ammori puts it, “trying to control the distribution of the emerging media.”

Photo by by Avatar/ΣΙΓΜΑ

Miro 2.5.4 fixes bugs on all platforms and makes some key updates on Windows that improve torrent performance and compatibility for Windows 7.   All users should update.

In particular, this release fixes some data issues, including a case where invalid torrent files could cause database problems.  Additionally we have updated to vlc 1.0.3 which addresses video quality issues on Windows 7 and we have updated libtorrent which should greatly improve torrent performance on all versions of Windows.

The complete list of bug fixes is available in the release notes.

You can download this version directly from our website.  We will turn on the automatic updates for windows and mac in a few days.

We strongly recommend that all users update now.

Kirby Ferguson is the Internet filmmaker and visual genius behind Goodie Bag, a Creative Commons-licensed web comedy series. In this week’s episode of Goodie Bag, Kirby distills four decades of celluloid New York annihilation into a three-minute musical montage. Watch as the Big Apple is destroyed by asteroids, monsters, tsunamis, and other assorted misfortunes.

“Hollywood V. New York” makes fair use of clips from films like Armageddon, Godzilla, Independence Day, and King Kong to explore Hollywood’s fascination with the destruction of Manhattan. The video is a great transformative work and presents a unique kind of visual argument.

If you liked this video, check out Goodie Bag’s interview with the found footage festival.

minutes

2.5.4 status (roadmap)

• Will fixed an additional bug on Monday that Janet tested and it looks fine.
• Will is going to build builds today. Then we'll test them and probably do a release Thursday morning and update the appcast file on Friday.

2.6 status (roadmap)

• subtitle work is almost done
• menus need to be refactored to finish up subtitle work
• lots of little bugs to work on left--we could use the help if anyone is interested in contributing!

Paul

• spent the week working on bugs in Miro Community
• started working on custom templates allowing admins to change the way their site works
• ten or so bugs left on the 0.9 roadmap to do
• going to triage the bugs in order to push out a 0.9 sooner

Janet

• working on finding an automated ui tester
• worked on Miro Community testing, too

Will

• did a bunch of fixes
• getting ready to push out a 2.5.4
• plans to work on refactoring the menus next

Ben

• implemented subtitle support on linux
• worked on osx bug fixes
• started looking into VLC freeze issues

bugzilla

• 7 bugs/feature-requests created
• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 6 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 2 bugs marked INVALID

notes

I wasn't on last week's devcall. Thus, no notes.

I've been talking about removing the xine renderer for 6 months now. I don't do this lightly--generally we want to add features, not remove them. However, we're a _really_ small team of developers working on Miro and one of the things I'm focusing on for the Miro 2.6 development cycle is to reduce and simplify wherever we can so that we can focus on the work ahead of us. Also, the gstreamer folks are doing a fantastic job and that project is really coming along. I feel very confident that switching to gstreamer is a good move.

Today is the day I did the deed. As of c1c6f33, the gtk-x11 platform of Miro no longer uses the xine renderer. This checkin removes all the xine code from the codebase.

A while back, I threw together a VLC renderer that mostly works. Other renderers can be built in the same way--the infrastructure is there for anyone to create new renderers and ship them as separate packages.

Even though this is a good move, I do realize it leaves some people out in the cold. If you are interested in championing the xine renderer and starting a project to build and maintain it, let me know and I'll do what I can to help out.

A few clever people have come up with some non-Flash alternatives to watching videos on YouTube. Despite being a proprietary format, Flash runs poorly and utilizes much of the CPU on Linux and Mac OS X machines. The reliance of big websites like YouTube on such proprietary software has led to huge inconveniences to people who do not want to run Flash or do not have it installed.

The folks over at Neosmart Technologies have created their YouTube HTML5 Viewer, where you can enter a YouTube video URL, and the website automatically converts it to be playable in a browser that supports HTML5—completely Flash free. For Firefox users, they’ve also written a GreaseMonkey script that creates a link from the YouTube page to the HTML5 alternative.

Mozilla’s own Christopher Blizzard decided to write his own userscript, dubbed Theoratube, that works in sync with the Firefogg extension for Firefox to scrape YouTube videos, convert them to Theora, and stream them back into the browser as quickly as possible. The process isn’t quick, and Blizzard talks about the bugs in his blog post, but at least it’s a non-Flash alternative to enjoying your favorite videos.

We are honored to announce that Nicholas Reville, co-founder and Executive Director of Participatory Culture Foundation, has been elected as an Ashoka Fellow for his work on Miro and open video. Ashoka is a global non-profit that identifies and supports social entrepreneurs, people who are creating social change in scalable, sustainable ways. We are delighted that Nicholas has been elected as a fellow and that PCF’s work has been recognized.

Even many of our users do not realize that PCF, which makes Miro and Miro Community, is a non-profit organization. We are! And if you don’t already know, our mission is to make tools that push media in a more open and democratic direction. We think having a few small companies control online video with proprietary technologies and huge centralized video hosts hurts free speech and limits innovation.

The Open Video Alliance has released a 13 minute vignette on the importance of open video. Featuring interviews with Amy Goodman, Yochai Benkler, Jonathan Zittrain and many more, the video is available for download here.

The video explores the importance of open codecs and platforms that don’t require permissions or royalty payments in order to share content. It also addresses the power of the moving image and user-created media, and how the open video movement promotes free speech and distributed creativity, sometimes against a backdrop of spurious intellectual property claims.

This is a preview of a longer production we’re working on for next year. For now, please share it with your friends and help us grow the open video movement. The video is licensed CC-BY, so you are free to share, modify, and redistribute it in any way you like—just link back to the OVA site.

This video was produced by Intelligent Television

Participatory Culture Foundation needs a part-time sysadmin, working about 10 hours a week, supporting Miro, Miro Guide, Miro Community, and our development tools. Do you know anyone great, especially someone who loves free and open-source software? Send them our way!

We are looking for someone with at least 3 years of experience and experience with multiple organizations.

We currently work with the following software and platforms:

* Ubuntu and Fedora
* Amazon Web Services
* MySQL and PostgreSQL (both maintenance and performance)
* Apache and lighttpd
* Squid cache
* Version control w/ Git and Subversion
* Nagios
* Litmus/Selenium
* Subversion
* Trac
* cgit
* Bugzilla

We need a teammate who is professional and extremely reliable. We are all passionate about the work we do and want someone who feels the same way.

Please send a brief introduction, a resume, and at least two references to npr[at]pculture.org.

Update: I neglected to mention that most of the staff works remotely from home from various places on the globe and we don’t need you to be in a specific location.

Thanks!

Recently a few people have reported that their McAfee Virus Scan is detecting trojans in the miro install and uninstall executable files.  This is another instance of McAfee getting false positive hits against the NSIS installer.

NSIS has a page on their wiki which they keep updated.  You can find it here: NSIS False Positives.

After a long period of waiting, Morgan and I both were able to pick up our Nokia N900 phones. We've both been waiting for these for a long time, and I'm happy to say that acquiring the device spoiled my weekend in the sense that I had plenty of things I had scheduled to do but found myself unable to do because there was too much to explore on the device. As for the phones themselves, I'll summarize briefly (then go into details later): usability wise the N900 phones are an absolute joy; free software wise the phones are not completely ideal but are mostly quite good and in that sense are probably your tentative best bet. (That last statement is quite loaded... I'll qualify it as I go.)

The primary competitors against the N900 in the free software space are the OpenMoko phones (Freerunner, and to a lesser extent the 1973), the android phones (G1 & Droid), and the Palm Pre.

Going over these briefly, the OpenMoko phones are by far the most free in every respect (I even have one, the 1973). I'd like to say that I thought the project was not dead, but considering production has ceased and the community seems largely exhausted, I am afraid it may be. There is some chance that production will start again, and maybe OpenMoko as a company will itself rebound and begin production of a new model based on sales of its WikiReader. But at the moment, I am not crossing my fingers. At worst, I do not think the time and resources were a bad investment: it demonstrated interest in a free software friendly phone and I suspect that the FreeSmartphone.org project was partly the inspiration for ofono (both are d-bus based). And though the hardware and software stacks both have issues, you can now use the one of these devices as a phone. But for the moment, the OpenMoko phones look to have a very uncertain future, and so (unfortunately) I would not put them in my "best bet" category.

Then there's the Android phones (or more specifically, the developer G1). The version you buy in a store is actually locked down to where you don't have root access, however it is possible to buy a G1 developer version (which is more expensive in the short term but cheaper when you factor in not being tied into an unnecessarily expensive plan), though you have to register as a developer first. Like the N900, the phone is not entirely ideal as in terms of providing a free software environment as it does come bundled with some proprietary pieces, but also like the N900 and Maemo, these devices and Android are still mostly free software at their foundation. There is a fundamental difference between Maemo and Android, however: aside from the Linux kernel, there is very little on the Android platform that may resemble what you have on your desktop... Google has developed a completely separate stack that is built on a Java VM for Android, and so in that sense Android is on its own little free software island: very little free software can be shared and come in, and very little free software can come out and be shared with the general free software desktop. Despite this, it is still a mostly free software platform, and before the N900 was publicly announced Morgan and I were on the verge of buying a couple of the developer versions.

Then there's the Palm Pre... I have heard this mentioned repeatedly as a free software option, but looking at it I don't see much worthwhile. As far as I can tell, the core of WebOS is itself proprietary, and while the system may be running the Linux kernel, it has at least as many blobs as the G1 and the N900 do, on top of having some sort of disturbing phone-home unfeature that sounds like a privacy nightmare. You also have to jailbreak the device to gain root access, and although Palm seems okay with this, jailbreaking as a requirement does not seem like a good first state considering other phones that don't require such an absurd step. Despite this, some freesmartphone.org hackers are considering the device as a possible option for an FSO port. However, that's the best this device has going for it free software wise to the best of my knowledge. Unless the FSO pulls through with a good port to the Pre, I don't consider it much of a free software option.

Now to the N900 and Maemo 5. Briefly on usability and aesthetics: it certainly holds up in this regard. I've felt that every aspect of the device felt really well thought through and comfortable from a user perspective, and Morgan seems to think the same. This is good in several senses: it means that the device is likely to have broad enough of appeal to be sustainable as in terms of sales (which matters to free software enthusiasts as it means the device and hopefully similarly free successors are likely to continue to be produced) and it also shows that a device with broad appeal based on primarily free desktop components is possible. Maemo 5 uses GTK, Clutter, Hildon, and QT for interface rendering, as well as D-Bus, PulseAudio, Telepathy, and many other components behind the scenes, all pieces that you probably are running if you have a free software desktop running on your machine. This means that existing free software applications are more likely possible to run natively or be ported to run without extrordinary difficulty. This isn't a perfect scenario: getting an application to look native on the device will likely require significant modifications for many programs, introducing a risk of forking. Even so, assuming both the N900 and the Android phones were to suddenly be discontinued, a GNU/Linux desktop user will have felt more benefits and less loss in terms of the free software surrounding the N900 than the Android phones.

As for distribution and packaging, the N900's default install (and current only option) is Debian-based, but not Debian itself. Unfortunately due to what seems to be a mix of hardware-specific optimization goals and a desire to separate the "flash-updatable" portion of the system from user-installed and updated sections of the system, all non-core packages are set to install in /opt/ instead of /usr/, which means that packages are pretty grossly incompatible with those directly from Debian. This is referred to as the "Opt Problem", and it is clear that many people are unhappy about it. Aside from the binary blobs, this is my biggest disappointment with the machine... I would really prefer to run vanilla Debian and have access to Debian's full repository of packages rather than having to wait for the ones I want to be ported over or port them over myself. At any rate, the machine has a slot for microsd cards, and I suspect it won't be long until it will be possible to boot vanilla Debian from there.

When the N900 phone was announced, there was an appeal directly to "software freedom lovers" which gave the impression that this phone would be yours, you are welcome and encouraged to hack it. I am glad to say that this is true. All I had to do was install rootsh and I had root access to the device... yes, real actual root access. And though I haven't done it, it also appears to be fairly easy to flash the machine. I should note that Morgan and I didn't purchase a special "developer" version of the phone either... the phones Morgan and I bought were purchased directly from the physical Nokia store here in Chicago. As I am typing this, I am simultaneously ssh'ed into the phone over my local wifi, installing packages via apt-get.

All that being said, unfortunately there are certainly a good number of components which are non-free. Nokia is upfront about what those components are but also gives some pretty stupid reasons for why. (Battery damage, really? As for safety, surely people could intentionally do much worse without needing access to the source code. That's silly.)

I really haven't talked much about using the device, mainly because my post here was concerned with freedom. All I will say is that I doubt you will be disappointed in using it... the machine feels very polished out of the box and it is clear that a lot of effort was put into making the user interface clear, intuitive, and beautiful. And it has succeeded in those regards marvelously. And as in terms of freedom, the phone is not perfect, but I am convinced for the moment that it is the best bet we have.

But hopefully Intel will show off some Moblin-enabled phone soon, and it will end up being more free software friendly than even the N900 is (which is still a huge leap forward for a mainstream phone). And at that point maybe you could swap installing Moblin on one and Maemo on the other. Because free software is awesome.

Edit: Pieter Colpaert points out that you only need to check the community updates to see that the OpenMoko community is not, in fact, exhausted. I hope that he is right. It is possible that my perspective is tainted because I have a much earlier model, the Neo 1973. Using that phone involved a lot of manual time trying to tweak things as everyone else had moved to the Freerunner (only a thousand or so of the 1973 were made, apparently), and between projects I didn't have time to figure out how to manually update alsa state files every time the freerunner community updated and broke mine. The community update post does show that there is life in the community. That said, I suspect there won't be much as in terms of new adoptions in the community until a new OpenMoko model is announced, so I fear that the OpenMoko community may be fighting brain drain. I could be wrong. I'd like to be. And I'd certainly love to hear of a new model being published. Maybe the success of these other partly free software friendly devices will raise interest in investing in a new OpenMoko device, which has always been fully free software oriented.

We are preparing for a Miro 2.5.4 release.  This has a bunch of data-handling related fixes, fixes for some edge-case crashers, and some other stuff.  It also contains an update to vlc 1.0.3 which should fix some Windows 7 compatibility issues.

We’d appreciate it if you could take the time to download and test out the build for windows, os x, or source.

Release notes and the roadmap for 2.5.4 provide more details about the changes.

If you could help us test, that would be invaluable.  We’d like to be confident that the database update changes work for a large number of people with a variety of different usage scenarios.

Testing is also good excuse to spend some time getting through your podcast backlog or spend some time looking for new content on the Miro Guide!

There are also regression testcases for anyone who wants to participate in the more formal testing process.

In May 2010, filmmakers and remix artists will gather in Brooklyn, New York for the first ever Re/Mixed Media Festival. The festival is organized by a group of designers, actors, and filmmakers known as lo-fi lounge.

Being artists and filmmakers ourselves, our aim is to provide a home to local filmmakers and media artists, offer them an opportunity to easily  screen film or video, provide the community with low-cost editing and production equipment, foster face-to-face social interaction, and make films that challenge the boundaries of the possible.  With the proliferation of media made possible by new technologies that put creation and distribution tools into the hands of the people, it’s essential that people understand the power of media, and the vast responsibility of wielding that power. Our intention is to promote media literacy, foster talent, and cultivate media appreciation in the community.

For the festival, lo-fi lounge is seeking remixed or mashed-up films that are under 10 minutes in length. The group seeks to display the products of and educate the people about fair use.

The Festival aims to challenge the current laws by bringing public awareness to media mixing as a legitimate practice, while at the same time remaining within their boundaries of the law.  We are soliciting artists who remix responsibly. This does not mean claiming someone else’s work as your own, it means recognizing that every artist contributes to the global cultural library and works can and should be built upon, modified, and repurposed with the goal of bringing a new work of art into the world.

Seems very cool—If you’re interested in participating, the submission deadline is February 28, 2010.

Much of the American political blogosphere is built upon the Left attacking the right-wing Fox News, or the Right ridiculing the left-wing MSNBC.  Thanks to the ongoing democratization of video, people can now do news and commentary à la The Daily Show from their bedrooms, catching politicians in their contradictions or criticizing television personalities for making fools of themselves. For these kinds of reflexive and multi-layered video conversations to work, users need access to the source material. On YouTube, there’s an active culture people who capture and upload short news clips for this purpose.

What happens, though, when Fox News decides to send over 150 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to YouTube—all aimed against a single clip provider? Well, the criticism is silenced. At least, briefly.

Many blogs, mostly liberal, get their Fox News clips from a YouTube channel called News1News. The Huffington Post, Truthdig, Gawker, and more depend on News1News for political fodder—something Fox News didn’t seem to like. Late last week, the large media corporation sent enough DMCA notices to push News1News far past YouTube’s three-strike rule, resulting in an automatic termination of the account and leaving many blogs with empty embedded players. Hundreds of thousands of viewers were met with a familiar message: “This video has been removed due to a terms of use violation.”

Gawker, which published the story yesterday, claimed (prematurely) that these takedowns were selective—a politically motivated move on Fox’s part—and noted that channels like ConservativeNation and GlennBeckDailyClips are still up. Later in the day, though, ConservativeNation posted that they began receiving takedown notices as well. As of today, both GlennBeckDailyClips and ConservativeNation have been suspended.

Under Section 512(f) of the DMCA, a copyright holder can be held liable if they misrepresent their claim against an alleged infringer. This means that Fox needs to keep fair use in mind before they can send takedowns, at the risk of being sued for damages. I’m no lawyer, but it seems pretty clear that use of these clips fall under or newsworthiness or critical nature needed to be protected by the fair use doctrine.

UPDATE: Perhaps the fair use claim isn’t so clear. Here’s an interesting piece by law student Arthur Bright via the Citizen Media Law Project. News1News hosted the clips of Fox News, but never provided any commentary or criticism themselves—they left it up to the blogs to do so. Should a user who clearly provides fodder to help blogs criticize still receive fair use protections?

We've been working on reducing the complexity of the code for Miro 2.6. We've done this in a few different ways and I want to summarize them here.

moved binary kit stuff to separate repositories

This dropped the size of the git repository for miro a lot. Cloning the repository is much faster now. Plus it's easier to build Miro on Windows and OSX from the source tarball.

moving libtorrent out of portable

On Linux, this allows us to rely upon Linux distributions to have packages for libtorrent (the Rasterbar version) and the Python bindings. We don't need to compile libtorrent as part of the Miro build process anymore. That dropped the build time like a rock, reduced the tarball size, and removed a bunch of issues from configuring and compiling Miro on Linux.

removing sorts.pyx and fasttypes.pyx

Removing these allowed us to remove the build dependency on Boost. That removes a bunch of assy code we had in the setup.py file. This also reduced the time it takes to build Miro on Linux.

adjustments to setup.py to be more whiny when things are missing

I added some code to the gtk-x11 setup.py to make it clearer when it's missing build dependencies. I then tested this on Kubuntu Karmic, Fedora 12, and OpenSUSE 11.2. Miro will still try to run if it's missing things--I'll look into this soon.

updated gtkx11 build docs

I went through and updated the build recipes in the gtk-x11 build docs page. I updated the recipes for Ubuntu Karmic, added recipes for Fedora 12 and OpenSUSE 11.2 (though it won't work because I couldn't find a libtorrent rasterbar package), and removed a bunch of old recipes that would never work. I'm planning to do Gentoo and some other distributions next.

I updated the build and runtime requirements lists, too.

removing xine

This hasn't been done yet, but it'll happen soon. This will remove some build requirements and it'll make our lives easier since we'll only have to support one renderer on Linux. Supporting two takes a time and effort and we're only doing a so-so job of it. Better to cut xine loose and focus on gstreamer. I'm sorry that this will affect some people. I'm hoping to rework the code so that additional renderers can be released as separate packages like I did with frontends.

conclusion

We're focusing on reducing the complexity of the codebase and build requirements to make it easier for new people to pick it up, build and contribute. If there's anything else we can do on this front--or better if there's anything YOU can help us do--let us know.

minutes

2.5.4 status

• Ben made some fixes for 12301, those will get merged in.
• Need to sync translations
• A new set of branch builds today and a release at the end of this week or early next week

subtitle support status

• Luc has it implemented for OSX. Still need implementations for Linux and Windows.
• Will's working on the Windows implementation.
• Ben's going to look into moving the menu/submenu code to portable.
• Either Ben or Will will work on the Linux implementation when their plates clear.

Ben:

• spent a while working on bug 12301. bunch of fixes that'll go into 2.5.4.
• researched "pumping up the volume"; looks possible so he's going to implement it.

Luc:

• frustrating week working on gstreamer subtitles support
• had problems getting his test files to play correctly with Miro on Ubuntu Karmic
• wants to hand off gstreamer subtitle support to someone else
• worked on scrollbar problem with osx

Janet:

• tested 2.5.4, tested 12301 fixes, and did a bunch of Miro Community testing

Paul:

• worked on bugs for Miro Community 0.9

Will:

• will merge in ben's 12301 work, sync translations, and make a set of 2.5 branch builds
• will work on subtitle support for windows
• will work on subtitle support for linux

bugzilla

• 9 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID
• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 1 bugs marked FIXED

notes

Several people said they read the reports weekly and find them very useful, so I'll continue writing them.

One person mentioned how there's no public information about Miro development. That's not correct. Here's a list of urls of public information:

• Bugzilla timeline http://bugzilla.pculture.org/roadmap.cgi
• Bugzilla roadmap http://bugzilla.pculture.org/timeline.cgi
• Git repository web frontend http://git.participatoryculture.org/miro
• Release notes for releases https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/ReleaseNotes
• We have #miro and #miro-hackers on freenode.net for IRC.
• Develop mailing list http://participatoryculture.org/mailman/listinfo/develop
• Planet Miro http://planet.getmiro.com/
• Miro blog http://www.getmiro.com/blog/
• Identi.ca group http://identi.ca/group/miro

Last week, YouTube implemented new features to give content partners more ways to block users from accessing video. “Block by Country” and “Enable Auto Block outside Ownership” are marketed as giving partners more control over their content, but these features have unsettling consequences for the online video medium.

“Block by Country” lets partners geo-block specific videos in areas around the world for any number of reasons—rights issues, cultural sensitivity, marketing strategy, etc. But by giving content partners the ability to block users in a given country, YouTube virtually guarantees a balkanization of the rights of viewers. Imagine if you had to live inside the United States (or New York City) to read a NYTimes.com article, or that you had to live in Russia to access certain Russian bloggers. Video is really the only type of content that is routinely treated this way, and by normalizing the practice of blocking content by country, YouTube is tugging at the fabric of the net.

This type of control may seem warranted for people who have put time and energy into creating a video. However, it fundamentally changes how we use and collectively understand the internet. One feature of the internet is that it transcends borders, bringing people closer together and facilitating communication. Uneven access to information by country is not what makes the internet a rich place—this special treatment of video portends a fractured and dangerous future for the web.

The other feature unveiled by YouTube, “Enable Auto Block outside Ownership” allows content owners to utilize YouTube’s Content ID system to automatically block any unauthorized mirror of a video. Though on its face this feature protects creators from others racking up views with their content, it also prohibits mirroring and viral distribution, two defenses against bad citizenship on YouTube. Kevin Driscoll of the YouTomb project had this to say:

Prior to the “Enable Auto Block outside Ownership” feature, mirrored videos existed more or less peacefully alongside “official” uploads because high-volume content owners could claim “ownership” (and, by extension, advertising revenue) on a mirrored video instead of having it blocked. By disallowing mirroring, videos are subject to a single-point-of-failure. Should the original uploader close his or her account, the video – and all of its comments, links, ratings, and responses – will disappear from the site.

It’s unclear whether the “Auto Block outside Ownership” feature would also prohibit video citations or short clips of protected videos from being uploaded. But such restrictions would have a negative effect on the ability of individuals to carry on conversations that rely on a fair use. As with other instances of YouTube’s Content ID system, the idea of fair use is nullified by a feature in the software.

Lawrence Lessig, in the seminal Code, writes that users are bound bound by code as if by law. “As the world is now, code writers are increasingly lawmakers. They determine what the defaults of the Internet will be.” The decisions written into the code of desktop software and websites structure the ways in which people can and will use them—they regulate the potential and limitations of the net, effectively as law.

These two features are prime examples of the maxim that “code is law.” By creating an environment where this sort of filtering and blocking is okay, YouTube is giving its partners powers over speech and activity that are at odds with the nature of the Internet.

“Despite its struggles, YouTube remains the primary home of web video and the accompanying discourse,” said Driscoll. “Any feature that privileges the property rights of partners over users, is disrespectful to the thousands of YouTube users that invested the site with their time, care, and culture.”

We switched the miro repository url from https://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/ to http://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/. If you were using https, then you should switch the origin url in the .git/config file. It's unlikely that's the case, though, since it's been broken for over a month now.

The Open Video Alliance is holding a video contest. The top prize: a trip to South by Southwest 2010 on us! To enter, make a video explaining why open video matters in 60 seconds or less. You can make any case you like, in any form you like (as long as it’s under a minute). Once you’ve made the video, upload it anywhere and give us the URL.

Our panel of judges (including web luminaries like Mitchell Baker, Jimmy Wales, and Jesse Dylan) will pick the best and most creative entries. Top prize is round-trip airfare, four nights’ hotel stay, and a badge to attend the SXSW 2010 Interactive festival in Austin. Three runners-up will win a Flip Mino handheld video camera, and we’ll give away tons of OVA T-shirts.

The contest was announced at the first Open Video Conference. We think it’s a great way to get people talking about open video, and we can’t wait to see the creative and clever shorts the web will generate.

The last day to submit a video is January 31, 2010. Go to the contest website to check out the complete rules, see other entries, or submit your own video.

A little over a week ago, I started Gnome Miro Community. I'm a Miro developer and we use a ton of Gnome stuff in the application. The site will index Gnome related videos from around the Internet. I hope it'll aid Gnome development.

I started a few categories: gnome-shell, gstreamer, and GUADEC 2009. I'll be adding to these going forward.

One of the big things that I did was to bulk load the GUADEC 2009 videos into Gnome MC. I built an RSS feed, populated it with descriptions of the talks from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit wiki pages, and pulled it all into Gnome MC. Today I pulled down the videos and generated thumbnails for everything and pushed that up, too. Took about 5 hours in total, but the data is much more useful now.

Gnome MC will do searches every night for new material out there. I'll keep tabs on this queue. If you know of videos that haven't been added either let me know or submit them through the site.

I'm really excited about this site and I'll do my best to keep it going and make it as useful as possible. I hope it helps to make Gnome as awesome as it can be!