Kaltura’s Blog

FOMS 2009

This post is a summary of FOMS 2009 discussions and developments that I see are applicable to collaborative media on Wikimedia’s sites.

FOMS 2009 included a lot good discussion and hacking. As with previous years the meeting included the establishment of Community Goals

Several Projects are of interest to the future of collaborative media on Wikimeida.

Software Patents

As you may remember last December Nokia raised some “patten issues” to get the free format ogg theora tossed out of the html5 spec. While this failed to stop firefox from shipping ogg it has slowed down Opera and given Apple a reason not to ship Theora support. OpenMediaNow.org is project attempting to take on patent issues around enabling media in free software in a legally conforming way. They aim to encourage developers and companies to publish research around open codecs and group together legal resources to confront this issue.

Client Encoding

As mentioned on wikitech-l, firefogg is a really great solution for uploading theora media to websites from within the web browser. You simply point it at your high quality HD or DV footage and it transcodes to theora from settings supplied by the web service and uploads  (in this case commons).  Some new features for firefogg where discussed including resumable uploads.

Server Side Flattening of Sequences & Video editor

The current state of PiTiVi the open source gstreamer based video editor was presented. PiTiVi has been a 5 year effort Edward Hervey that has some very nice distinguishing qualities over the other open source video editor efforts. Most importantly its a extremely modular gNonLib / gstreamer core. (allowing it to easily tie into the massive collection of gstreamer plugins).  PiTiVi’s is written in python and its interface is optional. We discussed how it could serve as a server side flattener for video collaboratively created on Wikipedia. This way you could save a sequence to a DVD or play back the flattened sequence with the java applet or a video plugin (just like video files are currently supported on Wikipedia).

Oggz_Chop

The current state of oggz_chop was reviewed and a model for highly scalable, accurate media seeking and playing via integrated open protocol for client side (liboggplay, firefox) and server side ( oggz_chop) ogg serving. Essentially oggz_chop provides headers for Firefox so it can request two resources one small oggz_chop generated resource ogg header and other being a normal http byte range request for the video payload. This will work well with proxies that already support http ranged requests. If your client does not send headers saying it support this model you will continue to get a single resource so things like wget myvideo.ogg?t=start&end will still work

Bright Future for Open Media Scaling Up & Support for Dirac

Dirac support was also discussed. Unlike the many years of efforts to get theora out into the media ecosystem we will likely be able to push Dirac out a _lot_ faster. This is because free code libraries are now powering media for popular web browser. We discussed adding Dirac support to both Firefogg (the in browser transcoder) and liboggplay (in library for supporting media playback in Firefox). Both efforts are relatively far along as ffmpeg2dirac already exists and some patches for liboggplay are on the way

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Kaltura. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.