In January this year we had the third Foundations of Open Media software workshop for developers. The focus this year was on legal issues around codecs, Xiph and Web video (HTML5 video and video servers), authoring/editing software, and accessibility. Check out the complete set of areas of concern and community goals that we decided upon.
As every year, at the beginning of the workshop every participant provided a 5 min introduction about their field of speciality and the current challenges. These are video recorded and shared with the community.
The videos and accompanying slides have been available for about 2 months now, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it – apologies everyone! So, here are your star videos in reverse alphabetic order published using open source video software only:
- Viktor Gal, Xiph / Annodex liboggplay
- Timothy Terriberry, Xiph – Theora codec
- Silvia Pfeiffer, Annodex/Xiph – video a11y
- Shane Stephens, Google – liboggplaya
- Robin Gareus, linuxaudio.org
- Rob Savoye, Gnash
- Peter Ross, Xvid & FFMpeg
- Michael Dale, Wikipedia & Metavid
- Jan Gerber, Xiph hacker
- Edward Hervey, Collabora – PiTiVi
- Conrad Parker, Annodex/Xiph hacker
- Charles McCathieNevile, Opera
- Benjamin Otte, swfdec
- Anuradha Suraparaju, BBC – Dirac codec
Enjoy!
How software did you use to encode these videos? I normally I have no trouble with Ogg Theora videos, but these have some serious problems. The two files I’ve looked at so far are of Tim Terriberry and Rob Savoye, and both ended abruptly in the middle of their talks. Also, the audio and video were way out of sync. If I can help correct these problems, please let me know. I have some experience encoding to Ogg Theora/Vorbis using Thusnelda.
That would have been ffmpeg on my Mac. Seeing as Thusnelda is out, mabye I should install the latest codebase of that and re-encode them.
Incidentally, I have no issues watching these videos. What platform are you watching them on? Do others have issues, too?
I’m using MPlayer on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny). I recommend using ffmpeg2theora, which uses ffmpeg to decode the original file, but uses libtheora and libvorbis for the encoding. Although ffmpeg is capable of encoding Theora, it is known to do a very poor job.
I gave a very slack reply – I did actually use ffmpeg2theora for encoding. But I used an old-ish version on the Mac. I’m still wondering about feedback from others before I go and spend another weekend on re-transcoding.
A Thusnelda-based version of ffmpeg2theora for the Mac can be downloaded from:
http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ffmpeg2theora-0.24-thusnelda.pkg.zip
Mark, I just re-encoded one of the videos with the new thusnelda-based ffmpeg2theora. Can you check if you have problems with http://www.foms-workshop.org/foms2009/pmwiki.php/Main/Chaals ? Thanks.
I sorry to report that the Thusnelda-based video of Chaals has the same problems: audio/video is way out of sync, and the video ends in the middle of a sentence. Also, I tried several different video players on Debian lenny, based on different libraries, and all showed the same problems: MPlayer, VLC, Totem-xine, and Totem-gstreamer. What video format are you feeding into ffmpeg2theora? I’ve noticed A/V sync problems with certain source formats when using ffmpeg2theora. What video player(s) have you tried, that don’t show these problems?
The input is dv.I even used the “–sync” parameter, but it seems that was the one screwing it up. It worked fine for my original test material and the sync is drifting, so the files are fine at the beginning (which is what I tested). I now have re-encoded the same video again – give it another shot. If ok, I will re-do the rest.
The new video of Chaals looks great, all problems solved! 🙂
OK, they should all be updated now. Let me know if there are any more issues. And … thanks for being persistent. 🙂
Thanks for making these videos available in a free format, and for your work on Ogg!