Planet Miro

Open Video Alliance: Re/Mixed Media Festival 2010

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:00:44 +0000

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.

Open Video Alliance: Fox Silences Blogosphere, Ignores Fair Use

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:36 +0000

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.

Will's blog: Reducing complexity for 2.6

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:31:00 +0000

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.

Will's blog: Dev call 11/18/2009 minutes

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:22:00 +0000

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

Open Video Alliance: YouTube Gives Partners More Ways to Block

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:00:14 +0000

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.”

Will's blog: git repository is now http

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:33:00 +0000

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.

Open Video Alliance: OVA Contest: Open Video in 60 Seconds

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:06:49 +0000

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.

Will's blog: gnome.mirocommunity.org

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:34:00 +0000

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!

Will's blog: Binary kits are no longer in the repository

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:20:00 +0000

I finished the work to remove the binary kit data from the miro repository today. Removing the binary kit data from the repository changed all the shas. To alleviate the problems this causes, I did the following:

Ran a git filter-branch --commit-filter that added a line to the end of every commit message stating what the original commit sha was. The shas are referenced in Bugzilla, so this maintains the papertrail.
Moved the "old git repository" to miro.old. If you're building Miro versions prior to Miro 2.6, it'll probably be easier to do that in the old git repository because the binary kit material is there.
Binary kit materials were moved to separate repositories.

The end result of this is that we went from 900mb for the repository and a full checkout to about 136mb. Clones are faster, it uses less space on disk, and you're not saddled with a bunch of binary date you probably aren't going to use. It's also much easier on the build boxes which are old and don't have a lot of disk space kicking around.

If you have any questions, comments, or problems, let me know.

Miro Testing Blog: 2.5.4 rc available

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:51:45 +0000

The release candidate for Miro 2.5.4 is posted. Please test it out and report any bugs found. Miro 2.5.4 will be a bug fix release for some database issues and contains an update to vlc 1.0.3.

Will's blog: Dev call 11/11/2009 minutes

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:21:00 +0000

minutes

2.5.4 status

Work is going well. There's a new bug that we should look into. But we've done RC builds and we're sending notes to users who are having problems with 12101 in hopes they'll test.
If things go well, we'll probably do a release in a week.

Luc

Did most of the implementation for subtitle support in VLC with Miro on Windows. Doesn't have a Windows build environment, so he's passing this off to Ben or Will to finish up on Windows.
Hoping to have the repository changes done asap.

Will

Keeping tabs on 2.5.4 rc1 testing progress.
Helped prisioner on IRC get Miro building on Windows with mingw32. Keeping tabs on that progress with the hope that we can switch from building with Visual Studio 2003 to mingw32.
Planning to do the big repository filtering today.
Planning to take on the subtitles in VLC on Windows work for Luc

Ben

Did a bunch of 2.5.4 work.
Finished the fasttypes removal work.
Got some more data on 12301. Going to look into it to see if there's anything we can divulge from it.

Janet

2.5.4 rc1 looks good except for bug 12426.
Continued working on building the test infrastructure for Miro Community. Has two volunteers helping with building test cases.

Paul

Working on Miro Community features: html editing for comments, fixing the submit a video flow, added an RSS feed for categories, ...
Back to working on Miro Community bugs.

Nick

Morgan is going to work on another theme for Miro Community.
Working on making Miro Community easier to modify.

bugzilla

11 bugs/feature-requests created
1 bugs marked DUPLICATE
7 bugs marked FIXED

notes

Are these reports useful to anyone? No one has commented, no one has mentioned them on IRC or email, ... If they're not useful and no one is reading them, then I should be spending my time elsewhere.

Open Video Alliance: DMCA Double Jeopardy

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:00:40 +0000

Crossposted from the YouTomb blog.

Posted on behalf of our friend AJ Mazur:

During December of last year, the YouTomb people helped me with a DMCA issue. I uploaded a remix video involving a Lazy Town song mixed with a Lil Jon song and it was taken down by a DMCA claim by LazyTown Entertainment. A counter notice claiming fair use was filed with YouTube and no legal action was taken against me so the video was eventually restored.

This week LazyTown Entertainment decided to file a second DMCA claim on the same video. YouTube takes it down again and this now being my third strike, terminates my account. It is in YouTube’s best interest to comply with every takedown request in order to obtain safe harbor in accordance with the DMCA, but this specific takedown raises policy issues and may expose a potential loophole in the DMCA. The discussion at hand is if this second DMCA claim is actually legal or not. We can’t find any specific cases where a situation like this has happened before but regardless of the legality, there is a need to revise policies within YouTube or the DMCA.

If there is some sort of “double jeopardy” type provision that prevents a second filing then we have an issue with how YouTube handles takedowns. Many takedowns are processed automatically and clearly this duplicate request was not noticed by YouTube’s system. This gives the wrong impression to users who may have prevailed in the face of DMCA claims, almost as if YouTube is apathetic to what you have done in the past. This also leans towards a revision of the “three strikes rule” and how all takedowns are counted against you, even if one has already been proven in your favor. The question also remains if there is a need to penalize the copyright holder and possibly YouTube in this instance.

If multiple filings are in fact legal then this is an aspect of the DMCA that needs revision. Theoretically, this practice of duplicate filings can be used to permanently take down content without ever having a dispute filed in court. All a copyright holder needs to do is immediately file another takedown as soon as the offending content is restored, and in the meantime there is no threat to the copyright holder to lose in court because it will never get that far since they are responsible for the filing. Even if it were to go to court a copyright holder can just use multiple legal teams to file takedowns at different points in time, each acting without knowledge of the other teams existing. Organizations known for silencing critics or even your standard internet troll could file an infinite number of bogus takedowns and may dodge ever going to court.

There is one known identical copy of the video on YouTube that was uploaded prior to this week and is still live (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0AhVyKCLY). We presume this copy has not been taken down because the account it was uploaded with is registered as a Canadian account. Takedown requests in Canada are handled differently in comparison to the rest of the world. If a takedown has been filed with this copy then the actual process may be delayed slightly. To summarize these are the questions at hand:

Is it legal for a content owner to file a subsequent DMCA claim against content that has been restored from a previous DMCA claim, filed by the same claimant, that was successfully contested? If it is not legal, who is at fault and how should they be penalized?

Will's blog: Need help testing KDE screensaver patch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:21:00 +0000

About a week ago, Joe contributed a patch to disable the screensaver on KDE when Miro is playing fullscreen. I don't run any systems with KDE on them. I'd love to get some help testing this patch so that we can include it in the next release of Miro.

The bug for this work is http://bugzilla.pculture.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3067. The patch is at http://bugzilla.pculture.org/attachment.cgi?id=1980.

Let me know whether this patch works or doesn't work for you either in the comments of this blog entry or in the comments of the bug.

Open Video Alliance: The Golden Age of Video

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:50 +0000

Artist Ricardo Autobahn took quite a few clips from classic movies and TV shows and strung them together to make this great remix, “The Golden Age of Video.” This is a great example of transformative, fair use of content that’s clever, catchy, and very danceable. Enjoy!

Will's blog: Dev call 11/04/2009 minutes

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0000

minutes

Paul:

Is sick.
Bug fixes and small features for Miro Community.
We have a lot of sites and things seem pretty stable.
Working on Miro Community 0.9 now. 0.9 isn't very feature-full, but it improves on things for style, look and feel, and such.

Luc:

Worked a couple of days on subtitle support for Miro on Windows using VLC. Building a test application in C. Once he's got that working, he'll transcribe it to Python and ctypes.
Switched gears to help Will to fix libtorrent build problems with the new binary kit system. Bumped into problems getting it to compile on OSX 10.4 (expletive expletive expletive). Worked around it.

Will:

Continued working on libtorrent and binary kit changes.
Wants to do a 2.5.4 that includes vlc 1.0.3, libtorrent/unicode fixes on Windows, and database fixes from Ben.

Ben:

Fixed database problems with duplicate ids.
Spent time removing sorts.pyx and filetypes.pyx from the codebase. This reduces complexity of the build.
Wants to push out a 2.5.4 with database fixes he's done recently.
Wants to finish the fasttypes removal work on OSX.
Talked about the sniffer code.

Janet:

Tested changes in Miro and Miro Community.
Working on making it easier to assign tasks to volunteers and get more volunteers involved in the process without losing track of them.
Wrote up a wiki page for subtitle implementation work and testing. This will become the specification of what we're implementing now that we're mostly done research. https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/SubtitleImplementationDetails
Is having her wisdom teeth taken out next week.

bugzilla

19 bugs/feature-requests created
1 bugs marked DUPLICATE
7 bugs marked FIXED
1 bugs marked WONTFIX
2 bugs marked INVALID

Miro News Blog: Miro Community Sites Blossom

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:09:18 +0000

Since the public beta launch of Miro Community on Thursday, we’ve been excited to see what kind of sites people would create. And we haven’t been disappointed – already, a variety of sites are testing their wings.

One of the most moving displays of MC’s potential is from tiny Cook County, Minnesota. Danna Mackenzie, the Information Systems Director for Cook County, told me:

“We are the northeastern point of Minnesota, on the Canadian border. Most of our land area is taken up by the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. We only have one stoplight in the whole county!

When I heard about Miro (via Twitter!) I knew that it was a perfect fit. I am so happy to read about your project and the energy and enthusiasm that is going into supporting the most important connections on the internet….the hyper-local ones!”

Danna points out that video is “the new lingua franca of the internet.” As one of the organizers behind the Cook County Ultra Broadband Initiative, she realized Miro Community could be a great way to develop excitement about the possibilities of high-speed internet. Although they haven’t gone public with the site yet, in the future, Danna looks forward to inviting the community to engage with videos of their friends and neighbors. Not only will this site function to bring together community members around broadband access and adoption, it also offers a way for Cook County to develop a new understanding of itself as a community, and to share that community with the rest of the world.

Also on the local front is http://vcam.mirocommunity.org/, a beta site created by the folks at Vermont Community Access Media. Already, VCAM’s Miro Community site has made it easier to check out VCAM’s content online, and they see great potential in the site to engage their viewers.

Many folks also jumped at the chance to make a Miro Community site outside of regional groupings. The Opencast Project has had a Miro Community site for over a month now at http://video.opencastproject.org/, compiling all the videos they’ve acquired over the years relating to the use of audiovisual content in academia. Miro Community has allowed Opencast to bring together videos from a variety of sources – from University material to YouTube video – all in one place. Having easily created an elegant video website, Opencast is a great example of how many organizations can start using Miro Community.

New Miro Community sites also include Womoz, for the newly minted Women & Mozilla project, A site for all things GNOME, Hackerlab, and many more. Other groups and organizations are just beginning to experiment with Miro Community for a variety of uses. One family thought to use MC as a way to bring together their family videos, while an international nonprofit is considering how curation could work for them. At http://videobloggers.mirocommunity.org/, videoblogger Jay Dedman explains, “Our community is playing a game where we each post a video a day for the month of November. Remix fun ensues.” We can’t wait to see what they come up with!

We’re only just beginning to see what Miro Community can be. Have an awesome example of an MC site? Email anne[a]pculture.org and let us know – we want to hear about all the innovative video communities you are creating.

Open Video Alliance: Kaltura Developer Meetup in NYC

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:00:20 +0000

For all of you in and around New York (and for all of you who don’t mind traveling), Kaltura is having its first ever developer meetup. Come get together with other developers and chat about open video and interactivity. The meetup will feature three short talks about upcoming news with Kaltura, open video in education, and upcoming Open Video Alliance activities. This will be followed by a half-hour technical session.

Date: Wednesday, November 11
Time: 7:00pm to 9:00pm (doors open at 6:30pm)
Where: Kaltura Office in NYC, 41st East 11th street, 11th Floor (TechSpace)

For those of you who can’t make it, the meetup will (hopefully) be recorded and available on Kaltura.org.

Will's blog: libtorrent out of portable

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:47:00 +0000

Miro uses libtorrent-rasterbar for bittorrent downloading. We had a copy of the libtorrent source code in the portable section of our repository. Miro would compile libtorrent as a Python extension along with all the other stuff to build Miro binaries. Not any more.

Luc is almost done carrying my changes over to OSX 10.4, but as of today, libtorrent-rasterbar is no longer in the portable section of our repository.

What does this mean?

For Windows, a clean build on our Windows build box went from taking enough time for me to make dinner, eat dinner, and then completely forget what I was working on (26 minutes) to 4 minutes. In my Windows XP vm, a clean build went from 8 minutes to 1 minute. Plus I fixed the unicode problems Miro had with Windows and libtorrent and updated Miro to use libtorrent 0.14.6 on Windows.

For OSX, a clean build on my mac mini running OSX 10.5.8 went from 17 minutes to 1 minute. Plus I updated Miro to use libtorrent 0.14.6 on OSX, too.

For gtk-x11, libtorrent is now a required system package. Miro will no longer compile its own libtorrent if you don't already have it installed. I'm pretty sure that most modern versions of the major Linux distributions have packages for libtorrent-rasterbar and the Python bindings.

We have a couple of other changes that affect the project structure almost done. I'll blog about them as they finish landing.

11/4/2009 - This is completed now. Many thanks to Luc who sorted out the issues I was running into with compiling libtorrent on OSX 10.4 with Boost 1.35.0.

Open Video Alliance: PCF releases Miro Community

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:29:58 +0000

This week, our friends over at Participatory Culture Foundation debuted a new video presentation site, Miro Community. In addition to providing simple and convenient access to diverse video content from anywhere on the web, it creates a unique, personalized video site in minutes. Best of all, it is free to create a site (and it’s open source, so you can host your own).

Miro Community tackles two fundamental issues facing online video—the navigation of content dispersed all over the web, and the difficulty for less tech savvy producers to establish their own attractive video site. Audiences and creators know all too well the hassle of searching unsuccessfully for a video or maintaining unified video content across a growing number of popular hosting platforms.

With Miro Community, creators can display all their videos in one location, even if those videos come from a variety of sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo, or are self-hosted elsewhere. Users and organizations can create their own website and pull together already existing content and add new videos. Visitors can comment, view administrator curated playlists, or submit a video that they think is worth adding to the collection.

For universities, this might provide more professional web front-end than either iTunes or YouTube for open courseware and related materials. For public broadcasting affiliates, it could mean a free, accessible location for digitally distributed content. In terms of presentation, the site gives video the spotlight and because it is ad-free, there are no unwanted promos to distract from the viewing experience.

Miro Community has issued a call to partner with local and public media organizations, so if you’d like to see your company get involved, be sure to check them out. In the meantime, give your own Miro Community site a try.

Open Video Alliance: Open Internet: 5 Minute Net Neutrality Video by Jesse Dylan

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:05:08 +0000

The folks at Public Knowledge have created a five-minute primer on the basics and importance of net neutrality.

Directed by PK board member Jesse Dylan and featuring PK president Gigi Sohn alongside a sampling of the usual suspects (Professors Lawrence Lessig and Ed Felton, members of the band Ok Go, Free Press’ Ben Scott, etc.), the video explains what net neutrality is and why it’s critical that we preserve the free and open nature of the Internet.

Miro News Blog: Miro Community Launches with a Focus on Local Video

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:29:40 +0000

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Miro Community, in partnership with the Knight Foundation. It’s a powerful way to draw video from all over the web, whether it’s produced by you or someone else, into a highly customizable site that you control.

CALL FOR LOCAL AND PUBLIC MEDIA PARTNERS:
We are beginning this public beta period with a particular focus on local communities. Over the next couple months, we will be launching locally focused video sites with WNYC in New York, BAVC in San Francisco, Medfield Access in Medfield, MA and several others (see our partners section below for more details on these and others). We are seeking additional partners for sites in other cities and towns. In particular, we are looking for organizations that have a strong local connection, an existing media outlet, and a curatorial focus. Miro Community will allow these groups to add a world-class video site, focused on their local community a virtually no cost and with only a small amount of curatorial work each day. It is an excellent way to extend your connection to your local community. If you are interested in launching a site in your city or town, please be in touch: dean [a] pculture.org.

This New Service
The primary goal of this project is to enable local video websites to quickly develop and flourish. Miro Community gives any person, public broadcaster, or local media access center a simple way to create a video front page for their city, town or region.

Miro Community was born out of the chicken or egg dilemma of hyper-local video: audience first or site/content first. When developing the idea, we realized that most organizations would need a guaranteed audience before they could dedicate resources to building an expensive video site. And likewise, there would need to be lots of interesting video available to community members, in order to attract this regular viewing audience. With this catch 22 in mind, we figured that making it quick, easy, and inexpensive or free to create a robust community video site was a sensible approach. We also realized that most communities have an abundance of video that exists on the web and just needs to be collected where a community could be cultivated around it.

Miro Community Demo for Floyd, VA

The Technology

Miro Community is designed to help people and organizations efficiently create, maintain, and curate a topical or hyper-local site. Videos can come from YouTube, blip.tv, Vimeo, or almost any video blog or site powered by drupal, plone, or other CMS that creates a media RSS feed. Miro Community is Free and Open Source Software (source available here).

We also decided to create a fully hosted version of Miro Community that would require no IT resources. The hosted sites can be located on AnyDomain.com or sub.Domain.com and are fully customizable through CSS. Every site has the potential to be completely branded and owned by the organization that creates it. Furthermore, conversations happen within the community site—positive social norms can be instilled and nasty comments (like the type that sometimes appear on YouTube) can be dealt with swiftly and painlessly.

Anyone can set up a site for free on our beta server.

A Video-Centric Approach

Sites that maintain regular viewing audiences are usually video destinations first and foremost. In other words, websites that integrate video as a secondary function or as an afterthought generally never gain traction as places to go watch video. The most successful video sites and communities are centered around watching the videos; for example, YouTube, Hulu, and the TED conference. These sites each have regular viewers/visitors who come expecting entertainment, enrichment, and engagement. Therefore we developed Miro Community with the idea that a successful community is built around the videos themselves and we didn’t focus on integration or hiding videos behind organizational firewalls.

Miro Community Partners

We’ve partnered up with a lot of great organizations for Miro Community, including WNYC, the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Economystory.org, the Pittsburgh Foundation and public access station Medfield.TV. WNYC’s upcoming site will expand video coverage of arts and culture in New York City. BAVC and Medfield.TV are leading the way in innovative new understandings of public access, embracing a mission of empowering community media both inside and outside of their studios. Jason Daniels, Executive Director at Medfield.TV, hopes that their site, video.medfield.tv, will particularly attract young people to a new vision of public access, creating connections between their online pursuits and their physical communities. Meanwhile, Economystory.org, a project of PRX, brings together unconventional stories about the American economy, and uses videos.economystory.org to present video stories that might not make it on the radio but are just as fascinating as the latest “Planet Money” coverage. As Economystory shows, Miro Community sites are not just for geographically linked communities, but also for communities of interest.

We’re interested in expanding our partnerships with local media organizations, and helping them jump-start a video front-page in their community. If you’re interested, or know a person or organization who might be, please get in touch: dean [at] pculture.org.

Miro Community has been made possible through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Will's blog: Dev call 10/28/2009 minutes

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:08:00 +0000

minutes

Paul:

Worked on Miro Community stuff over the week.
Talked about infrastructure for the MC services.

Janet:

2.5.3 looks like a pretty good release.
Tested Will's torrent-related fixes--looks good.
Testing Luc's subtitle work. Found some bugs with the subtitle code and older versions of OSX. Otherwise, it's looking good so far.
Talked a bit about Miro Community testing. We have a few volunteers helping, but there's still work to do.

Luc:

Worked on subtitle stuff. Happy to see people are starting to test subtitle-enabled builds.
Worked out some bugs so it now works on 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.
Working on getting subtitles working on Miro on Windows with VLC.
This is coming along nicely and we decided it should land in Miro 2.6 so we're going to move the work to the master branch.

Will:

Reworked Miro on Windows to use a packaged binary kit.
Switched Miro on Windows to use a pre-built libtorrent from the binary kit.
Planning to do the same for Miro on OSX.
Pushed out a set of Karmic packages for 2.5.3, but they aren't well tested.

Ben:

Did some bug-fixing.

bugzilla

23 bugs/feature-requests created
12 bugs marked WORKSFORME
1 bugs marked INVALID
2 bugs marked DUPLICATE
3 bugs marked WONTFIX
3 bugs marked FIXED
25 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Open Video Alliance: Vodo embraces P2P for film distribution

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:00:54 +0000

Vodo is a promising new project that offers a new method of film distribution that combines peer-to-peer (P2P) and donations to increase impact and support filmmakers. The venture has already released a fantastic feature film, Us Now, directly to some of the largest video viewing communities online. This particular release has garnered well over 100,000 downloads in less than a week. Vodo aims to have more feature films up within the week.

Jamie King, director of Steal this FIlm II and mastermind of the operation, realized there was an immense amount of attention that could be pooled together from P2P communities. He’s using websites like The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and TorrentFreak as a platform to introduce, distribute, and popularize awesome film. Vodo also aims to create a real relationship between the film creators and audience, hoping to eventually help support filmmakers financially in their work.

Vodo relies on the premise that for many independent filmmakers, file sharing isn’t a big concern, but reaching a wide audience is. King reasons that by spreading the films, they are gaining a grassroots buzz that rivals current Hollywood blockbusters.

The site also fosters a donation-based business model by including information about how to contribute to the creator in every file, along with a link to do so directly. All donations go straight to content creators, letting them cultivate a loyal audience and respond directly to their fans. Vodo itself is supported through membership by subscribers, who in return receive access to films being considered for distribution as well as those already available. Subscribers also vote on which of these films should be picked up by Vodo, and have direct access to producers and directors.

Open Video Alliance: Supreme Court to Reconsider Software Patents

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:00:51 +0000

On November 9, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Bilski v. Kappos, a case that could have a big impact on the future of online video.

In 1997, Investors Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw attempted to patent a business method they had invented—specifically, a method of hedging risks. When brought to court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the patent. In its ruling, the appeals court stressed a test for patentability known as the “machine-or-transformation test.” This test establishes that a process is patentable in two instances: one, if it’s tied to a machine, or two, if it transforms something from one state to another. The appeals court left the decision’s effects on software ambiguous. Immediately after the initial Bilski ruling, the patent office rejected four applications from IBM, citing that a machine wasn’t necessary for their processes.

The question now is whether software patents meet the “transformation” part of the machine-or-transformation test. Though the facts of the case do not hinge on software patents, the Court’s interpretation of Bilski—which could either clarify, narrow, or expand what is patentable—may determine whether or not software falls within the scope of patentability.

What impact would this have on the online video ecosystem? If the Court were to eliminate software patents—or at least create a stricter standard of patentability—it would alleviate much uncertainty. The open source community operates in the constant and looming shadow of (often frivolous) patent infringement lawsuits, and a ruling tightening the patent regime could pave the way for future innovation.

Most legal experts acknowledge that the patent system is in need of reform. Billions of dollars are spent each year on patent claims, and damages and injunctions are wildly unpredictable. The patent pool is so expansive that virtually every new product must acknowledge a minefield of potential liability and seek to mitigate it. This results in hidden costs, and—some argue—an institutional bias against nimble innovators.

“The real power of [software] patents has not been their overwhelming intellectual force and originality, but the simple logistic difficulty of exposing oneself to expensive litigation, which also has the chilling effect of retarding adoption of any technology under that cloud,” said Dan Miller, co-founder of On2 Technologies. “I suspect these stratagems will undergo some changes but the general approach of creating a ‘patent thicket’ will continue apace.”

Makers of video compression technology have a hard time navigating in this thicket. H.264, the video compression standard associated with MPEG-4, is heavily patented. Makers of free software are barred from implementing it, since it would require paying licensing fees. By contrast, Theora is an royalty-free video compression format, and has been supported by Mozilla and others because it can be freely distributed. No one needs to seek permission to use Theora, nor pay a dime in licensing fees. Yet even Theora is haunted by the patent specter. Certain players worry that Theora’s patent history, inherited from On2’s VP3 codec, may one day be threatened by so-called submarine patents—ancient patent claims that seem to rise up out of nowhere. This is perhaps one reason why Theora was not chosen to be the official codec in the HTML5 draft standard. But in a world where everything is potentially at risk of patent infringement, submarine patents threaten everyone. (On2 Technologies, which created and publicly released the VP3 codec that is the basis for Theora, was recently acquired by Google. It is still unclear whether or not Google will choose to release On2’s newer codecs, like VP8, into the public domain.)

So should we count on big changes to the patent landscape? Would the open source video community benefit from such a decision?

“The Bilski case is very interesting and could potentially have a profound effect on the software community, but its full impact on the codec community would really depend upon how broadly software patents were invalidated,” said blogger Davis Freeberg. “To a certain extent, the very transformative nature of the codec itself could be interpreted as an exception/loophole to Bilski’s case, so I expect it will take more litigation before this moat can be completely filled in.”

Various companies and advocacy groups have filed amici curiae, or briefs that provide information—often from a specific point of view—that may help the court in its decision. Many of these organizations have filed briefs on whether software should be patentable. Groups like the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, and Red Hat state that software should not be patented. They claim that innovation is stifled when patents and murky legalities need to be taken into account. The SFLC holds specifically that software is a set of algorithms—an abstraction—and therefore not patentable. On the other hand, giant companies like Microsoft, Philips, and Symantec have filed a brief stating that software should be patentable because of its physical ties to a computer.

There is little reason to believe that the Bilski decision will have a huge, immediate effect on video codecs and software patents. The legal situation is murky, and, as history shows, court decisions like this will take time to set in. But if the Court were to hand down a surprise ruling, it’s easy to see how the aftermath could be disruptive.

Open Video Alliance: Film Annex feature on OVA and the Open Video Conference

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:01 +0000

Film Annex, a network for independent movies and TV shows, has an interview up with OVA’s Ben Moskowitz discussing participation, social networks, and next year’s Open Video Conference. Check it out!

Miro News Blog: AcaWiki Goes Live!

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:28:29 +0000

If academia has been filled with walled gardens of content, there’s now a way to smell the roses without breaking and entering. We’re pleased to see the launch of AcaWiki, a collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed, nonprofit “Wikipedia for academic research.” At PCF, we’re big believers in the use of open-source and collaborative tools for education, and making inroads in traditionally closed off academia is a crucial part of ending educational inequality.

AcaWiki allows users to post summaries and literature reviews of academic papers, helping both academics and the general public gain access to the central ideas of peer-reviewed research without having to shell out big bucks for something that may not even be relevant to them. They make use of the important fact that you can’t copyright an idea to spread knowledge far and wide, while retaining the authority of a peer-reviewed process by focusing on materials that have been judged by others in their field.

AcaWiki can be used by those just interested in gleaning a little more knowledge about a variety of subjects, but it can also be used for more specific purposes. Do you teach classes that require students to write responses to academic papers they read? You can have them incorporate their response into a summary or review and tag it with your class name, so that students can benefit from one another’s readings and contribute to a wider body of academic knowledge. If you’re a researcher, AcaWiki is an excellent tool for easily figuring out what papers are worth purchasing or reading in whole.

As we’ve seen with fair use, it’s important to stand up for the rights we already have and make robust use of them in order to develop a truly participatory and thriving culture. Every time you write a summary, you’re proactively standing up for the critical fact that copyright doesn’t cover ideas, and in doing so, you’re ensuring a right to access of knowledge. So support open educational resources by checking out AcaWiki today!

Open Video Alliance: WordPress adds Ogg support through VideoPress

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:33:20 +0000

WordPress is often cited as a paradigm for open source innovation. As an easy, powerful blogging service, WordPress software is now powering many, many blogs—including our own. So it’s exciting to hear the latest announcement from the WordPress team: support for open video.

“While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video can be played directly on browsers that support HTML 5, such as Firefox 3.5 and Chrome.”

Saavy, self-hosted users can check out the open source video framework, which handles uploading, transcoding, and more.

•VideoPress supports OGG

Will's blog: Miro 2.5.3 packages for Ubuntu Karmic released!

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:29:00 +0000

I just pushed out packages for Karmic for Miro 2.5.3. Until Karmic is out, consider these packages beta quality. If you use these packages and run into problems, let us know as soon as you can.

Ubuntu installation instructions

Will's blog: Dev call 10/21/2009 minutes

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:23:00 +0000

minutes

Nick and Luc weren't on the call. Janet and Will had colds. Ben's side of the call had some weird 15 second delay. That made it a dicey call that we ended on IRC.

Minutes for this morning's call:

Paul:

Working on Miro Community finishing up version 0.8.

Ben:

Worked on a lot of bugs, especially 12101. Checked in a few fixes into master which look pretty good, but need testing.
Worked on a bunch of other bugs.
Worked on 12229 to allow for distribution of RSS and content on a DVD.

Will:

Worked on extracting binary kit stuff from the repository.
Planning to work on Karmic packages for 2.5.3.

Janet:

Sick.
Hoping to get to testing the changes Ben made for 12101.
Spent some time testing Miro Community and is getting geared up to start testing Luc's subtitle code.

bugzilla

14 bugs created
2 bugs marked FIXED
1 bug marked DUPLICATE
1 bug marked INVALID

Open Video Alliance: Open Video comes to SXSW

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:23:48 +0000

The first batch of panels for South by Southwest 2010’s Interactive Festival were announced today. Of the 2300+ submissions, two out of our three proposals made it through so far—all thanks to your votes and comments.

What’s Open Video and Why Does It Matter? — This panel covers the essential ideas behind open video, including the importance of open video, what participation means in the digital age, and what the legal and technological battles that surround online video.
Wikipedia Gets an Upgrade: Collaborative Video — This panel will explore the implications of adding video to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has recently teamed up with Kaltura to implement OGG Theora video; however, there are lots of technological implications, communal implications, and both legal and practical issues.

Be sure to keep an eye out for our upcoming Open Video Contest, where one grand prize winner will receive a trip to Austin, TX for SXSW 2010 Interactive!

Miro News Blog: Share That Film with Vodo.net

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:28:28 +0000

Vodo is a promising new project that aims to dismantle the toxic environment of Hollywood PR and film distribution. The venture has already released a fantastic feature film, Us Now, directly to some of the largest video viewing communities online. This particular release has garnered well over 100,000 downloads in less than a week. Vodo aims to have more feature films up within the week.

Start watching Vodo films now with this Miro subscribe link. As always, Miro takes all the guesswork out of finding and downloading bittorrent files.

Jamie King, director of Steal this FIlm II and mastermind of the operation, realized there was an immense amount of attention that could be pooled together from peer to peer communities (both “pirate” and “non-pirate”). He’s using websites like The Pirate Bay, Minniova, and TorrentFreak as a platform to introduce, distribute, and popularize awesome film. While the Pirate Bay is a thorn in Hollywood’s side, it is also home to millions of avid film fans — it’s the perfect place to catapult filmmakers to international recognition. Vodo also aims to create a real relationship between the film creators and audience, hoping to eventually help support filmmakers financially in their work.

Vodo relies on the premise that for many independent filmmakers, piracy isn’t a big concern, but reaching a wide audience is. King reasons that by spreading the films, they are gaining a grassroots buzz that rivals the hollywood machine.

How does Vodo support the creators whose films they distribute? By including information about how to donate to the creator is every file, along with a link to do so directly. All donations go straight to content creators, letting them cultivate a loyal audience and respond directly to their fans. Vodo itself is supported through membership by subscribers, who in return receive access to films being considered for distribution as well as those already available. Subscribers also vote on which of these films should be picked up by Vodo, and have unprecedented access to producers and directors.

So check out Vodo’s truly independent productions for free today! A regular flow of engaging films is on its way, and you can start with Us Now, an appropriately themed film about the possibilities for participatory government. Come be a part of creating a new system that lets artists and audiences thrive.

Miro News Blog: VideoWTF – Keep those Questions Coming!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:05:48 +0000

In its first week, VideoWTF has been a great success so far. But the site is filled with so many smarty-pants video folks looking to help out others that questions rarely stay unanswered for long. this is a great problem to have and shows what enthusiasm there is for collaborative projects. It also means that we’d really like to encourage more questions. Remember, whenever you ask something, it’s getting recorded for the future in an easily searchable format. So by posting those video questions, you’re really doing a great service to your fellow video enthusiasts.

We’re also looking for more people for are familiar with Linux-based programs to answer the many questions about open-source and video. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you have an interest in both…

I challenge you to stump video WTF’s community with your toughest questions!

Miro News Blog: Miro 2.5.3 Released

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:03:31 +0000

Miro 2.5.3 was released yesterday. It contains some bug fixes that are relevant to all users. There are also updates to vlc and libtorrent.

We strongly recommend that all users update now.

Will's blog: 2.5.3 coming soon--I promise!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:52:00 +0000

The Miro 2.5 series has been a total pain in the ass--I'm not going to lie. Not only has it infuriated a number of users, but it's been like a Sysaphusian struggle for the team.

Right now there are 3 developers (Ben, Luc and myself) and 1 QA person (Janet) that work on Miro fulltime. Then we have a large community of testers, translators, and a handful of people who send in patches to fix the problems that irk them most. Even with this large community, the majority of the development, testing and support is done by 4 people.

In the last three months, Janet's house was hit by lightning frying a bunch of her testing machines; I bought a house and moved (along with the build boxes); Ben went on vacation for a month; Luc bought an apartment, moved, and then had his Internet connection totally hosed for a month; I had unforeseen medical problems (that I don't really want to talk about), that resulted in me being offline for the last two weeks; and our ssl certificates expired.

This week is the first time since the beginning of August when we've had all 4 of us working.

We've been trying so hard to get a much-needed 2.5.3 release out. It has a slew of fixes that should alleviate an array of problems that users have been experiencing. We're finally on the verge of the release. I hope it'll happen today or tomorrow.

I really appreciate the patience many of you have had with us as we scrambled to do the impossible over the last couple of months. I really wish it could have happened differently, but it's as if the forces of nature were completely against us.

Though 2.5.3 should fix a variety of issues, we're working on re-architecting some portions of Miro that aren't working well with the database changes we made in Miro 2.5. On top of that, we're working on subtitle support, extensions, and continuing to make Miro a better experience for a larger group of people. Some/most/all of this will show up in Miro 2.6 and 2.7, hopefully in the next few months.

Will's blog: Dev call 10/14/2009 minutes

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:48:00 +0000

note

I wasn't on the call for 10/7/2009, so I don't have notes for that day.

minutes

Will:

Planning to push 2.5.3 out.
Planning to keep working on extracting binary kit stuff.
Then get miro working on Karmic Koala.
Then moving libtorrent out of portable.
Will be in Providence, RI from October 23rd through 26th.

Luc:

Continuing work on subtitle work.
Perian doesn't support subtitles in subfolders. Luc is looking into fixing Perian and then sending a patch upstream.
Luc is going to start looking into VLC support next.

Ben:

Planning to work on 12101. One of the theories is that when torrents are downloading, Miro is doing a lot of disk thrashing.
Remove torrent metadata from the updates.
Tweak status so that we only persist to disk every now and then.
Plans to work on bug 12229.
It's difficult to figure out how many people are affected by 12101.

Paul:

Working on Miro Community 0.8 release. It's coming along nicely.

Janet:

Tested Miro Community and Miro 2.5 branch builds.
Working on testing plans for Miro Community post 0.8 release.

2.5.3 status:

Talked about 12277 and 12276 and where we're going with that plan.
Hopefully we'll get it out today or tomorrow.

bugzilla

8 bugs created
1 bug marked DUPLICATE
4 bugs marked FIXED
2 bugs marked WORKSFORME
1 bug marked WONTFIX

Open Video Alliance: Got questions? Video WTF can help

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:00:24 +0000

Over time, video is getting more and more ubiquitous, but there remains a few access issues with today’s methods and technologies. In other words, making and sharing video can be hard. Luckily, the Participatory Culture Foundation, a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, has unveiled their newest project, Video WTF.

Video WTF is a community-based help center where anybody can pose a question, and anybody can answer it. Questions can be about anything—from what camera to get on a certain budget, to what the best screencasting software is, to why there is an annoying hum on the stage mic. You don’t need to register to ask/answer a question, but registration and participation does come with certain privileges over time. See more at the Video WTF FAQ.

Ideally, video is easy. In reality, problems and uncertainties exist. The great thing about a site like Video WTF is that there’s an entire community out there happy to help.

Open Video Alliance: OVA Tipline: Help us spread the openness!

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:40:27 +0000

We’re here to keep you updated on everything related to open video—new technologies, legal issues, ideological struggles, big announcements, etc.—but sometimes things fly under our radar. This is why we need your help!

Come across any relevant news, stories, or artwork? Send us a tip at tips@openvideoalliance.org.

Miro News Blog: Video WTF: a new question and answer site for video creators

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:19:58 +0000

Today we are launching Video WTF, a new collaborative community site for video creators to ask questions and offer answers for anything related to video production— cameras, editing, publishing, and more. We think this will be an extremely useful site for the video community at large. We think WTF really sums up how we feel when we’re stuck on with a camera or editing problem. The site is based on the StackOverflow service, so we think it’ll work well.

We could really use your help getting this new community off the ground!

Here are three things you can do to help:

Tell your friends— mention the site on twitter, blog it, and forward this message to anyone you know who is a video creator or video expert.
Ask questions! Have a question about video production? Stuck on something? Looking for the right tool? Ask a question.
Offer an answer— take a look at the questions that have already been posted and jump in with an answer. Here are the questions that have already been asked.

Miro News Blog: Subtitles Success!

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:14:32 +0000

We recently asked you to help us fund a programming project to bring basic subtitle support to Miro… and you did! The next major release of Miro will include basic subtitle support for videos.

Thanks so much to those who helped spread the word and donated!

While this basic feature will be awesome, we had additional motives in gauging the community’s interest in subtitle support (and I’m really excited that folks came through). This successful litmus test helps us move forward on our larger subtitling project for standardized subtitle search and delivery. We’ve been talking with friends at Mozilla recently, who are also very interested in this vision of distributed and collaborative subtitles.

Turning distributed subtitling into a ubiquitous standard could be our most ambitious project to-date… stay tuned and thanks again for showing us how much you care!

Open Video Alliance: Ceding Control on the “All-Sharable Frontier”

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:00:26 +0000

Video is a primary tool for advertisers, political campaigns, and other brand messengers. “The challenge is to achieve maximum exposure… we control the message. We control the positioning,” writes marketer Jean Huy over at Lost in Dots. But as video tools fall into the hands of more people, brand messengers will have to plan on ceding some control. “If you think that it’s already a challenge to moderate your message board, follow your tweets, and to keep some consistency across your social media initiatives, be prepared to the real challenge,” he warns.

Videos are the last all-sharable frontier. With minimal knowledge and tools, it’s easy today to copy, alter and post text and images from about anywhere to about everywhere. Right click on a jpeg picture and you’re done copying it from the web. Double click on the copy and it will open the picture in your favorite free photo editing application, enabling you to modify the image, add text and save it as a new picture, ready to post on the Internet. But that’s not the case with videos. Videos are coded in tens of proprietary formats, causing insurmountable barriers for the average user willing to edit part of the content. And worse, popular so-called ‘video sharing’ sites like YouTube simply make it impossible to download the original video file without [special] software.

As we reach a certain level of video standardization and the tools become universal, it will become much easier for everyday users to play with video content. You can expect to see this unfold in interesting and unexpected ways. Users of products and services will begin to talk back.

The results won’t always be pretty. Perhaps the commercial for a particular product or service will be altered by a scorned customer, becoming a vehicle for that customer’s dissatisfaction. The altered video might end up becoming more popular than the originals. This potential for this has existed for years, but we’re only now starting to imagine it on a mass scale.

Of course, remixes and other alterations of commercial content aren’t always motivated by a personal or political agenda. In 2006, one artist reimagined a garish TV commercial for household cleaning product Cillit Bang as a grinding techno dance track, just for fun:

The creators of the original commercial could not possibly know what it would spawn. But the dance remix was a runaway viral hit, amplifying the brand visibility of Cillit Bang. This kind of wild appropriation is becoming increasingly common, with uneven results. Sometimes user participation is a blessing; other times it’s a curse.

What’s clear, though, is that brand messengers will need to abandon the pretense of one-way communication. As soon as a video is subject to remix and critique, the original message may be skewed. Context can disappear. Control can be altogether lost.

There’s no better illustration of this than in the work of artist Santeri Ojala, aka “StSanders.” StSanders briefly became an internet phenomenon after he posted overdubbed videos of famous guitarists shredding to his own awful guitar solos. The videos became hugely popular—until they were taken down and StSanders was banned from YouTube.

Here’s one (of my favorites) starring the band Iron Maiden (via Wired):

Though some artists laughed off the videos, others were horrified by the potential for damage to their musical prestige (hence the takedowns). Though Ojala stands by the claim that his works are transformative and fall under Fair Use, hijacking someone’s likeness in this way likely runs afoul of statutes protecting personality rights. But that doesn’t mean creative mischief like this won’t continue on a large scale.

Millions of images float through the ether of the web, undergoing constant alteration along the way. Sometimes the source of the image, and the message it was meant to contain, are lost. As video-editing tools become easier to use and standardization continues, we’ll see a similar phenomenon with video. In fact, many viral videos today are impossible to trace back to the source, but continue to cycle through social media as people share them for creative and critical purposes. With the distinction between content creator and consumer slowly fading, marketers will have to rethink how they engage with audiences.

…be prepared to the real challenge of open video combined with social media: the ultimate consumer-empowering tool about to rise. How are marketers going to deal with it remains an open question. I personally like to think that it might help us go back to the essence of communication: building promises that make sense to consumers and that can be kept. If you’re scared about angry customers spoiling your viral ‘open video’ campaigns, a good start should be to understand why they’re angry and improve their experience of your products before building any kind of social campaign.

In other words, a participatory audience isn’t something marketers should fear—but it will require new modes of engagement.

Open Video: The Next Challenge for E-Marketers

Open Video Alliance: Kaltura webinar tomorrow: video in education

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:00:21 +0000

Check out Kaltura’s webinar this Wednesday for some use cases of open video in education, with presentations by David Germano, Director of SHANTI at University of Virginia and Chris Millet of Penn State.

The show starts at 2:30 ET. You can register here.

Open Video Alliance: Theora 1.1 released!

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:50:56 +0000

Last week, Xiph released Theora 1.1, marking a huge update in the way open video is encoded and decoded. Ogg Theora is a compression format that is increasingly being adopted for online video, largely because of the fact that it is open and royalty-free. Though the Theora format itself hasn’t been updated, Mozilla’s Christopher Blizzard does a great job in showing how the Theora 1.1 codec (compression-decompression software) brings huge improvements. These include better quality videos (which allows for lighter videos, size-wise), improved live streaming, a more efficient two-pass encoding system, and more.

Will's blog: Dev call 9/30/2009 minutes

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:06:00 +0000

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Janet:

Has gone through all of the tests on Windows XP for 2.5.3 rc1.
Working on testing Miro on OSX.
2.5.3 rc1 is looking good so far.

Luc:

Worked on 12212 and should have it fixed tomorrow.
Worked on subtitle ui--it's coming along nicely.
It's hard to determine which subtitle thing is which language which makes it hard to allow users to choose a default subtitle language.
Worked on external .srt subtitle handling.
Perian doesn't support external .srt for movie containers it doesn't open by itself (mp4, quicktime, ogg, ...). Luc's running into problems with that and is trying to talk to the Perian developers.
VLC handles everything created so far just fine. Luc's tossing around ditching Quicktime/Perian for VLC. (ed note: I think I summarized that right--but I could be completely mistaken about what Luc is tossing around.)
Will continue doing subtitle work in a subtitle branch that'll eventually get pushed to g.p.o.

Ben:

Hopped on the call to say hi.

Will:

Worked on 2.5.3 bugs, put out a rc1 release.
Working on redoing release process, scripts and infrastructure to make releases easier and cleaner with git.

Paul:

Working on Miro Community--almost done with version 1.0.
Working on unit tests.

kickstarter

We achieved the $1000 goal in large part to a couple of key donations. Thank you!

bugzilla

21 bugs created
7 bugs marked FIXED
1 bug marked DUPLICATE
8 bugs marked INCOMPLETE
2 bugs marked INVALID
1 bug marked WONTFIX

Open Video Alliance: An Award to Help Aspiring Filmmakers

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:00:00 +0000

For those of you working in film, a big break may be in sight. The WorkBook Project recently announced the first Discovery and Distribution Award initiative. One feature filmmaker will be chosen to receive the award—which comes with a one-week theatrical release in Los Angeles, PR support, and a cash award.

In the current environment, it’s often tough for budding filmmakers to break through larger companies’ hold over the theatrical market. Often, it’s tough to find audiences, distribute work widely, and raise money to not only cover costs but also to sustain their next project. By guaranteeing an artist distribution, marketing, and profit, this award serves as an out for both film and filmmaker.

Though one filmmaker will receive the award, 20 runners up will be propped up through various online distribution outlets. Judging begins in less than two months, so be sure to submit soon!

The WorkBook Project, which partnered with the Open Video Alliance to hold the Open Video Conference earlier this year, is an online community that collects innovative methods, media, tutorials, and advice from people who see the collective benefit of making their creative processes transparent.

Miro Testing Blog: Miro 2.5.3 Release Candidate build testing

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:45:50 +0000

The developers have fixed a TON of BUGs for a 2.5.3 release and it is time to get some serious testing done on the posted release candidate build.

Changes include some fixes to some unknown errors, updates to vlc and libtorrent, changes for some os x 10.6 specific issues, and some other file naming problems on windows.

Thanks to a contribution for Jason, we have also added the ability to play any item in an external player via the right-click context menu. This is the initial implementation of a long-requested feature.

Because there are so many changes that affect all part of Miro, we really need to get to broad testing on this. Please download the nightly build for your os: windows, os x, source.

There is a 2.5.3 rc test run in litmus. The focus areas test group consists of tests for the areas that have been changed the most. Please give us some of your time and run few test cases.

Open Video Alliance: Microsoft Supports HTML5 Video Tag

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:07:40 +0000

In a recent message that has come as a shock to many, Microsoft endorsed the use of <video> and <audio> tags. Adrian Bateman, the Program Manager for Internet Explorer, posted about this a few weeks ago.

The new HTML5 specification includes these <video> and <audio> tags to allow for both video and audio to be played from the browser without the use of a plugin, like Flash or QuickTime. This allows for open, royalty-free codecs like Ogg Theora to be widely utilized. It also frees video and audio from its current, largely proprietary grasp, which reduces the legal and technological costs of entry, allowing for more participatory media. Many new browsers support these HTML5 elements, such as Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome, and Opera 10. Internet Explorer, which holds the largest market share for browsers, was conspicuously missing from this list. By announcing its support, IE has potentially allowed for a much larger base upon which this new HTML5 framework can be built—though what will actually happen remains to be seen.

Will's blog: Dev call 9/23/2009 minutes

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:29:00 +0000

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Luc:

Working on fixing problems with 10.6 build environment and getting Miro working on 10.6.
Working on subtitles. (Please help us fund this!)
Having issues with .srt files rendering with Perian and 10.6.
Snow Leopard support is targeted for 2.5.3.
Talked about subtitle implementation specifics.

Will:

Working on trying to get 2.5.3 out.
Working on 12101.

Janet:

Testing fixes targeted for 2.5.3.
Working on Miro Community testing. Planning testing and manual testing.
Suggested we build a pre-rollout/pre-demo checkoff list for testing.

Paul:

Worked on Miro Community and it's almost at the 1.0 point.
Miro Community still needs polish, documentation, testing plans...
Two sites are live now.
There are a bunch of sites on deck.

kickstarter

Subtitles project on kickstarter has 24 backers for $494. We're hoping it clears $1000 by the end of the month--8 days to go.

bugzilla

19 bugs created
4 bugs marked FIXED
3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
1 bug marked WONTFIX
2 bugs marked WORKSFORME

Open Video Alliance: Happy OneWebDay!

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:05:16 +0000

Today is OneWebDay, a sort of Earth Day for the web. In 2006, OneWebDay started as a day to celebrate the innovation and creation on the internet. Since then, however, it has grown into a day of action—encouraging equality and openness online.

Mozilla features various ways of participating today, such as printing out a poster declaring how much you love the web and taking a picture with it. Another way to help is to sign OneWebDay’s pledge to end the digital divide—an important step in creating a democratic, participatory web.

Today’s your chance to share the love. Encourage others to take a moment and think about the web, its importance in all of our lives, and the need to keep it open and equal.

Open Video Alliance: OVA Signs European Net Neutrality Open Letter

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:00:01 +0000

The Open Video Alliance recently joined a number of organizations in signing the “We Must Protect Net Neutrality in Europe!” open letter to the European Parliament. Network Neutrality has been in the spotlight recently in Europe with regards to the EU’s Telecoms Package. Recently, many European telecom companies have employed discriminatory practices that add an extra step between the sending and receiving of content. This roadblock is antithetical to progress, to innovation, and to the fundamental openness of the web. The petition requests members of the European Parliament to understand the benefits of a neutral internet and act accordingly:

We who have signed this open letter urge the European Parliament to protect the freedom to receive and distribute content, and to use services and applications without interference from private actors. We call on the Members of the Parliament to take decisive action during the ongoing negotiation of the Telecoms Package in order to guarantee a free, open and innovative Internet, and to safeguard the fundamental freedoms of European citizens.

The petition was spearheaded by La Quadrature du Net, a French civil liberties group that specializes in topics in the digital age. We encourage other organizations to join onto the list of signatories. This is action that is not only important for openness and media, but also for the future of the internet in general.

Uwe Hermann: Help add subtitle support for Miro

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:55:44 +0000

If you ever wanted to support an open-source project but you are not a programmer, here's one (of many possible) ways to help:

The Miro project (Internet TV / Video and Audio Podcast application for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X) is seeking for pledges/donations that will be used to add subtitles support in Miro.

To quote from the announcement:

We’re hoping to build real subtitle support into Miro in the next couple months, but we need your help! So we’ve started a Kickstarter project to raise $1,000 to develop this feature for Miro on all three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you pledge to help make it happen? One of the great things about the Kickstarter model is that unless we can reach $1,000, your pledge won’t be charged.
[...]
(if you live in the United States, donations are tax deductible — we are a 501c3 non-profit)

There are 11 days left to make a pledge.

Will's blog: Dev call 9/16/2009 minutes

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:55:00 +0000

summary

Every Wednesday morning we have a conference call that we call the "dev call". This has been happening for years. Mostly we use it as a place to schedule upcoming development, talk with each other about problems we're working on, and come up to speed on where we're all at.

I occasionally take minutes when someone isn't on the dev call. I'm experimenting with posting the minutes on this blog for the next month. If it turns out to be useful, I'll keep doing it. Otherwise I'll stop.

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Luc:

working on getting Miro working with Snow Leopard.
cleaning up the sandbox code.
it'll make things much easier when we drop support for 10.4--but that's far in the future still. (15% of OSX users are using 10.4 according to Miro Guide stats.)
then we talked about the costs of supporting 10.4 users.

Will:

worked on Miro 2.5.3 and 2.6 all week.
talked about bug status for 12028, 12150, 12166, 12101, and 12108.
talked about how we're building libtorrent and how we should bump it to the binary kit which will definitely alleviate some issues and possibly alleviate others because we're not really building it "right" in the first place.
made changes to Planet Miro and took over curating.

Janet:

got her machine back which was fried by lightning in August.
working through reworking her test environments.
testing the Miro 2.5 nightly that Will built.

Paul:

working on Miro Community.
almost done with merging "users" and "authors". should get resolved in the near future.
continuing to implement styling stuff from Morgan.

kickstarter

Subtitles project on kickstarter has 12 backers for $191. We're hoping it clears $1000 by the end of the month.

bugzilla

Rough Bugzilla stats:

16 bugs created
8 bugs marked FIXED
4 bugs marked as DUPLICATE

Miro News Blog: Get a Podcast Featured on Miro

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:37:26 +0000

As many of you know, PRX is now featuring the best audio podcasts on the web in the Miro Guide. Having your podcast featured exposes it to an audience of savvy listeners eager to find awesome content, and is an all around great way to reach a new crowd.

Know of an amazing podcast? Share it with Emily from PRX: emily[at]prx.org.

Many of us know and love the excellent shows from NPR and other public radio mainstays, but Emily also wants to hear about the not so well known and spread the love. Think your podcast is an excellent companion to “This American Life”? Or maybe your music show is so hot listeners will never turn to Pandora again? Doing an oral history project in your community and think it could resonate with millions? Give it a shot and send a link to Emily. If she likes what she hears, you may see it featured. And don’t forget to give props to your favorite shows by sending them along, too. You’ll gain good-listening karma and we’ll all win.

Open Video Alliance: DMCA Safe Harbor Applied to Veoh

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:00:56 +0000

A judge ruled recently that Veoh, a web video site with user-generated content, was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Safe Harbor provision, thus stopping Universal Music Group’s copyright suit against the website. UMG was suing Veoh for allowing the sharing of video that contained music of UMG’s artists. The judge, however, felt that Veoh was taking all steps necessary to avoid liability.

The § 512 (c) Safe Harbor provision states that a service provider will not be held liable if they are unaware of infringing material and if they take the necessary measures to take down infringing material once they are made aware. The judge found that Veoh had a strong DMCA policy and had done what was financially and reasonably possible to eliminate infringing work. He noted that, had companies been forced to act under the general awareness that infringing material was being uploaded, little technological progress would be possible. (Read the rest of the ruling.)

This buzz around this ruling is its potentially huge implications on Viacom’s similar (but much more expensive) suit against YouTube. YouTube is under fire from Viacom for not doing enough to block infringing content, though they seem to be taking similar steps as Veoh. Although the Viacom case is in a different district and the UMG case does not have to apply, the ruling court will most likely take it into account.

Video content providers can rest a little easier knowing that they have a better chance of protection under Safe Harbor. Hopefully, this will skew money, time, and effort away from costly litigation as copyright owners realize that they are responsible for takedowns, not the video provider.

For more information, check out Ars Technica’s coverage of the case.

Miro Testing Blog: What’s up

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:44:08 +0000

Few updates about what’s come and gone in miro testing lately.

Souce and Nightly Build testing:
Source repositories: a few week ago we migrated from using subversion to git. If you’d like to keep track of the code checkins, you can view the changes here: https://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/log/?showmsg=1 . It’s useful to see the regular changes if you are actively using nightly builds.

In Litmus there a new group under the nightly build test run, for weekly recommended tests. In that group there will be a selection of test cases relevant to the recent code changes of the past week. I’d really like to focus on improving the time gap between when a bug was injected, to the time it was detected. I think focused testing will help that.

Miro 2.5.3: we’d like to push out a 2.5.3 release soon. In 2.5 there are issues where users will get an unknown error on startup. There have been some changes to how we handle and log errors that occur during database transactions. Another different error that looks the same on Windows has also been corrected for the 2.5.3 release.

Additionally, vlc (for windows playback) has been updated to 1.0.1, libtorrent has been updated to 0.14.5. Perian Quicktime components (for os x playback) have also been updated.

Miro 2.6: Work is underway for the next major release. The most notable enhancement is subtitle support Luc is working on adding subtitle support to allow for more translations as well as assist the hearing impaired. To help finance it, we’ve posted the project on Kickstart.

We have also had some code contributions. There is now a context menu for items: Play Externally. This implements part of bug #9350, which is a long-requested feature. We have Jason Woofendon to thank for that patch.

Will's blog: Planet Miro status 9/13/2009

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:42:00 +0000

I appointed myself Planet Miro curator this morning. I also made some changes:

added new related links
added an about page
added Uwe Hermann's Miro tagged feed
added Open Video Alliance feed

Going forward, I'll blog about Planet updates.

Chris's blog: Invest in what you believe in

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:06:26 +0000

I just got back from Djangocon, which was pretty awesome. I was once again on the video team, much like at PyCon. Now that I've got traveling and such out of the way I can return to working on personal projects in my "spare time".

And hey, one of those spare projects turned out to be making some contributions to Miro. Pretty much just minor GTK-X11 specific fixes or enhancements thus far. I'm hoping to return to more Miro hacking in a serious way in the future, but of course I'm not working for the PCF full-time any more, and I notice that the kind of things I'll likely be working on will be a bit different: it really will be more scratch-an-itch style development. Working on serious projects would probably require more full-time dedication than I'm able to give at the moment.

Which actually leads me to another point. Free software and free culture projects all require funding. I tend to think that if you reap the benefits of these kinds of projects, and especially if you really believe in them, then you should consider putting your money toward them. Think of it in terms of the Lessig Challenge: how much money do you put toward media distribution companies, proprietary software vendors, etc whose policies and actions you object to? We do live within a capitalist system, and that means the best way to vote toward change is often to vote with your dollar. (There are other ways to vote of course, you can vote with your effort and time too. Generally the best option is to do both.) So putting your money toward things projects you believe in, even when that "purchase" won't result in an immediate result, is something I think everyone should do.

One such project is subtitle translations in Miro. The PCF is trying to raise funds toward this, and I think it's a great opportunity to tackle accessibility in open video, which hasn't really been covered yet... I'd really like to see this bar make it all the way:

I wouldn't stop there either. What organizations do you really believe in? Various groups could use your support, in especially what has been a terribly difficult year for nonprofits. A sample of groups that I think are important and worth joining or donating to in the free culture / free software sphere: Creative Commons, GNOME, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation... these are all important groups that need your help.

As for media, support independent artists, especially those that use free culture licenses like Jim's Big Ego, Professor Kliq, Brad Sucks, or any one of the many awesome artists on Jamendo or Magnatune. The Blender Foundation is creating a new Open Movie, Project Durian. They're very close to meeting their pre-order goals... of course, they could still use some help, and the more orders the better (at the moment, if you preorder, you can get your name in the credits). That's a great project in particular because it funds Blender development, helps create an awesome movie, and even releases all the source files under free licenses. They have other items in their E-Shop, too. When you buy hardware, try to buy devices that are free software friendly. There's loads you can do in the realm of media and technology.

There's tons you can do outside of technology, too. Morgan and I get all our groceries from the local farmers' market, from our local CSA, and from independent grocers. When we go out to eat, we go to independent restaurants instead of chains. The Eat Well Guide is a fantastic directory for finding ethical sources of food near you (especially consider joining a Community Supported Agriculture program... it's a cheap and easy way to get fresh, local and organic food at your door every week).

Maybe not everything I've listed here meets what you believe in, but probably something does. Just remember that your time, effort and money are all incredibly important resources, and how you use them will change the world, either in ways you believe in or ways you don't. So invest wisely.

Will's blog: Who else should be on Planet Miro?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Who else should be on Planet Miro? We're interested in getting content and updates from anyone who contributes to Miro, Miro Guide, Miro Community, Open Video, or any of the other endeavors that we're working on.

If there are blogs or people you know of whose work should be synidcated on Planet Miro, email me to let me know.

Will's blog: Support subtitles in Miro--do you really want it?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:02:00 +0000

As of September 11th, there are only 10 people in the world who are interested in subtitle support in Miro enough to contribute to it. Is that right? Were we completely mistaken in thinking that users want subtitle support?

If subtitle support in Miro is important to you, take the time to contribute now. If you live in the United States, donations/contributions are tax-deductible because PCF is a 501c3 non-profit company.

Also, help us get the word out. Write about it on your blog, dent it, digg it, reddit it, ... Help us make it happen. Help us help you.

Miro News Blog: PCF and PRX Team Up

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:36:56 +0000

PCF is pleased to announce that Public Radio Exchange has begun curating audio channels for the Miro Guide! Since we first started talking about having audio on the Miro Guide, we’re known we wanted to involve folks who really knew radio in adding and featuring content. Who better than PRX – based out of Cambridge, MA, their mission is “to create more opportunities for diverse programming of exceptional quality, interest, and importance to reach more listeners.” The Boston Globe calls PRX “a smart solution to the problem of excellent and innovative productions failing to reach wide audiences.”

We know that Miro Guide users are always on the lookout for new and interesting content, and we hope that this partnership with PRX will expand the choices available in the Miro Guide and, most importantly, help you get some great new content to listen to!

So say hello to PRX moderators Genevieve and Emily, and keep an eye out for the awesome podcasts they recommend in the “Moderator Pick” bar on our Audio page.

Miro News Blog: Help add subtitle support for Miro

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:28:14 +0000

We’re hoping to build real subtitle support into Miro in the next couple months, but we need your help! So we’ve started a Kickstarter project to raise $1,000 to develop this feature for Miro on all three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you pledge to help make it happen? One of the great things about the Kickstarter model is that unless we can reach $1,000, your pledge won’t be charged.

See how we’re doing and make a pledge >>