Projects

Submitted by Maxigas on Thu, 2006-10-26 02:07.

TX Projects

The Transmission network are working on many projects aimed at widening online distribution for social justice video. Where we can, we try to use Open Source tools do to it. Some of our projects involve Video Content Management systems, subtitles, help files, video codecs, a screeners database and much more.

"TX" is short for transmission (in case you're wondering).
We would love individuals or collectives with similar aims to get involved.

How projects are organised

Some of these projects have received funding and some are unfunded, they all rely on lots of volunteers putting in time. They are co-ordinated using working groups. These working groups should be reachable through their mailing lists or co-ordinators. Some of the more general projects like the Transmission Miro player are dealt with on the Main Transmission mailing list.

The messy organisational work is done on the transwiki: http://wiki.transmission.cc

Our mailing lists are here http://lists.transmission.cc/listinfo

Miro TX

The Miro TX player is our own special version of Miro, and one of the best ways for anybody interested in independently distributed social-justice and environmental video to find new videos. Miro TX showcases content from across the Transmission network in a video player which has all our video podcast feeds pre-installed - ready to browse and download.

This is a must-have tool for anyone doing regular screenings at social centres, film festivals, or even community TV, who is looking for new content to screen. If you're working on a campaign, or if you're just interested in viewing critical and engaging video about topics such as human rights, conservation, globalisation, sustainability, gender and sexuality, climate change, poverty and development, then you'll find Miro TX useful. It provides you with quick access to new independently produced documentaries, art and music video with an edge, speakers on key topics, political mashups, coverage of protests and actions.

You can download videos (including via bittorrent), create playlists of your favourite videos, curate your screenings and show them fullscreen, all from the same application. TX Miro includes feeds of new content from Clearer Channel, EngageMedia, Politube, v2v, subMedia.tv, VisionOnTV, ThePeopleSpeak and IFIwatch.tv.You can also add any other channels you want, just as you can with Miro.

We currently have a test version of the player available Windows TX player | Mac TX player

  • Collaborative workspace: Wiki


Metadata / TXFeed

In some ways one of the more obscure groups but the aim is clear. We need to swap full details of video items from site to site and be able to search them. The goal is to standardise a set of metadata we collect, and the format we make this metadata available for content-sharing.

We call this output the TXFeed. Here is the TXFeed standard we are working on now TX standard 0.9 and so you know what it looks like the EngageMedia's TX feed

There is some more information about the project on the TXFeed project page.


Subtitling and Translations

A group to look into technical requirements of creating, sharing and displaying subtitles. This group will also look at improving communication between video collectives and translating collectives.

g8

The group also looks at the Closed Captioning technology for playing videos with subtitles as DVDs, stand-alone files, streaming flv files. Much of this is explained on the Subtitles project page


Drupal

Existing to create implement or create tools to make creating a drupal video distribution site as easy as possible. At the moment a lot of work is being done on the http://ifiwatch.tv site. A custom set up is in place now which can import MediaRSS feeds and re-export them as feeds as well, display the full info about the imported videos, as well as do the uploading video aspects that you might expect.

A more advanced Drupal site is now being worked on to replace the current ifiwatch one. When it is complete there are a few applications that may happen including some video Indymedia sites.

  • Co-ordinator: zoe*esemplastic.net
  • Mailing list: transmission-drupal
  • Collaborative workspace for ifi page: Wiki
  • Collaborative workspace Drupal general: Wiki


Documentation

Over the last 18 months or so there has been a lot of work done on creating manuals and help files for the transmission network. This has mainly taken the form of manuals created on the FLOSS Manuals system and a sister site by the name of Suitcase Manuals.

There are a lot of documents in those systems on the subjects of video distribution systems, video podcasting, encoding video, making DVDs, creating and playing subtitles. What we really need to work on now is making those chapters as accessible and well used as possible. The ones on Podcasting are being used by the Tactical Tech Citizen Journalism Toolkit. Here are some useful links

Please do get involved in the Documentation group to help make the process of video publishing easier for people and groups to do.


Screening Database

MoreIsMore (working title Network Distribution System, or NDS) is an online platform seeking to tackle long-standing problems that cultural organisations suffer with the offline distribution of their products (typically books, magazines, catalogues, sound recordings, films). It provides a web portal where producers, couriers, resellers and others involved in the promotion and distribution of such goods can negotiate and administer the entire sales process from order to fulfilment. Using the most up-to-date web based tools and a social networking paradigm, NDS functions as a global market place and support structure, improving members' visibility, efficiency and overall sustainability. The title MoreIsMore puns on the modernist dictum 'Less is More' – whose use in the Bauhaus and by Buckminster Fuller was indexed to utility (of technology and form) – to highlight the wealth of material being produced in all corners of the cultural sector, and make this available for purchase to all.

The project has now launch as of 25th June 2008.

  • Co-ordinator: simon*metamute.org and laura*metamute.org
  • Mailing list: mute-tech*lists.metamute.org
  • Dev site: MoreisMore.net
  • Blog


FOSS Codecs

Whilst many groups have a commitment to making their Content Management Systems and documentation freely available, most employ or promote proprietary video codecs such as Flash, Quicktime and Windows Media amongst others. These formats are often entangled in a range of patents and copyrights that limit their use and future development.

For codecs such as Ogg Theora to be taken up widely by social justice online video distribution groups much work needs to be undertaken to make them easy to use and adopt.

EngageMedia wrote a report "FOSS Codecs for Online Video: Usability, Uptake and Development" for the Transmission network in 2007. This report is available here.

This group is now looking towards formation of an Ogg Development Consortium to work towards development goals outlined in the report. This group consists of EngageMedia, Metavid, and other TX members on the Codecs discussion list.


Less active or not yet active groups

Some of these ones are just ideas for which no working group was proposed or any substantial work done, but came up during the discussions and some people found them inspiring. Some are groups that were formed but are less active. You are free to propose a working group on any of them, or just implement them separately. ''"Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don't have to actually use them myself."'' (Salvador Dalí)

Aggregation

This is short term project a group to create, or to recommend tools to get their Metadata ready for a Meta data standard. Ideally it would create a feed that would be compatable with Democracy player and one compatible with the ongoing Metadata standard presented at re:transmission. This has some overlap with the Drupal video development group.

  • Co-ordinator: mickfuzz*rocketmail.com
  • Collaborative workspace: Wiki

Do No Harm

Promoting appropriate and ethical use. Developing a guideline for ethical use. Thinking about ways to use upload forms as an educational campaign on appropriate use. Lobbying websites to include/link to ethical use guidelines.

  • Co-ordinator: maxigas*anargeek.net
  • Mailing list: N/A
  • Collaborative workspace: Wiki

p2p client tracker

Application development idea: Let's develop a P2P client which feeds off the transmission feeds which are delivering torrent files -- making the desktop computer an automated tracker. Such an application if advanced could serve as a decentralised alternative to YouTube. (Jamie)

Involving people: Writing job descriptions to volunteers who are not creating videos: for example to watch them and describe them.

Upload forms: People need information about why they should fill in the upload form before we present them the form. Also: If we read as much data as possible from the file itself and fill half of the form with it, then users are more motivated to add more data.

Think about adding metadata at the desktop level, through common video applications?

Online transcoding service: the idea of an online transcoding service popped up a lot of times as thing that would really make our life easier. The automated service would be used by a number of online activist video sites that do not manage to run a transcoder on their server for technical or financial reasons. Furthermore, it would be much easier to point users to a simple online transcoding service that is available as a Web 2.0 service for all operating systems on all Internet-faring computers than to write documentation for all common video editing programs. To summarise, the potential and the need is still there, but implementation is lacking.

Publishing subtitles with ATOM+REST: Since ATOM provides a publishing protocol, maybe we could accomodate translators who would like to provide subtitles for somebody else's published videos? The idea would be: person A publishes a video on a server with a URI, person B uses PUT to update that URI to add a subtitle metadata tag to the original post, pointing to the translated subtitile file. Since translation is best done in the target locale, decentralizing the process seems a good idea to me.

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