Category Archives: Digital Media

The Future of Video on the Web

Digital Media

We are in the middle of a big technological change for the dear old World Wide Web. And it will have a massive impact on how we are using video on the Web.

Not only is the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) defining an all-new HTML5 standard which will have a native video tag (just as current HTML4 has a native img tag).

The W3C is wondering how to go even beyond that onto a road that will make video a first-class citizen on the Web. Next week, a W3C Video Workshop will be held on that exact topic.

Funnily enough, when we described the aim of the Annodex project at CSIRO in the year 2000, we used those exact words: how to make video a first-class citizen on the Web. At that time, people thought we were crazy. Now that YouTube is a commonly accepted phenomenon, we can actually see the limitations of existing video technology on the Web: we can still not interact as naturally with video as we do with Web pages – we can still not search well for video – and we can still not mash-up video as easily as we do with HTML pages, e.g. through RSS feeds.

I will be travelling to the US next week to share our experiences on Annodex with the Web World and have my input on what the future of video on the Web should look like. To that end, I have submitted two position papers to the workshop – one on Temporal URIs and one on our experiences with Annodex and CMML. Check out the other cool talks on the agenda or even the full list of position papers that got submitted!

Also, I have just been asked whether I would like to be part of the “Future of Video and Next Steps” Panel on the second day of the workshop – a panel that has been very well selected to represent online and traditional video technology, content interests, and consumer interests. I am looking forward to a very lively discussion and a great overall workshop that may be the first step towards a better video web.

Video on the Web is still only at the beginning of its evolution – comparable to the evolution that film and movie theatres have gone through over the last hundred years. It’s awesome to be working on the next technology revolution and to see that the best is yet to come!

Annodex the solution for ethnographic researchers

Digital Media, Open Source

A few years ago when I was still at CSIRO, I was contacted by Linda Barwick from PARADISEC to research into the use of Annodex for linguists. The main problem was that ethnographic researchers are publishing research outcomes on paper or even HTML, which are essentially discussions about small sections of field recordings of exotic languages – however, they had no means to do citations of these sections through hyperlinks or any other simple interactive means. In the time of online media, that should be a trivial task, right? But it wasn’t. Annodex and the timed URIs provided the right basis for a solution.

Fast forward lots of months of work in the EthnoER project and you get a solution for ethnographic researchers which is unique and completely based on open formats and open source software. Check out Linda’s blog entry of today!

Congratulations to everybody who has put all that effort into the project – Nick Thieberger, Linda Barwick, Shane Stephens, Stuart Hungerford, Jonathan McCabe, and all the others whom I forgot. EthnoER and Annodex might have changed the way in which linguistic research online can be published – not a small feat at all!

Editing the Skeleton and CMML standards

code, Digital Media, Open Source

In the last few weeks, I’ve created an Internet-Draft (I-D – a draft specification of an IETF RFC) for the Ogg Skeleton meta track, and updated the CMML I-D to include a new element called “caption” (CMML DTD). All of this is work that should have been done a long time ago, but I only got the motivation for it through the WHATWG work on HTML5 which will take Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis as baseline codecs. Since liboggplay is the key open source library that implements this baseline codec support, and liboggplay supports Annodex, it seems plausible that Annodex (which adds essentially Skeleton + CMML) will be available in Web browsers of the future. So, now is the time to fix up the few open issues that remain and cast the specifications into readable I-Ds.

If you haven’t seen the great functionality that will be available with liboggplay, you should check out the liboggplay javascript API. I’ve seen Shane make a demo web page through which you can toy with the javascript API, but haven’t got the link available right now.

FOMS 2008 support by Mozilla Foundation

Digital Media, FOMS, LCA, Open Source

It is awesome to see FOMS – the Open Media Software developer workshop we ran for the first time this year – turning into a major audio and video developer event for Linux. FOMS 2008 will be in Mel8ourne in January and will focus on audio on Linux (in particular libsydneyaudio) and on native Firefox support for Ogg Theora (in particular liboggplay). Because of the latter, FOMS has attracted sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation. This sponsorship is very welcome since most of the relevant developers come from overseas and are not part of large organisations that could afford to pay the expense. Check out the current list of participants on the site – it will be another milestone event for open media! And … thanks Mozilla Foundation!

Good Manners for Adobe Flash on Linux

Digital Media

Today, I had to deal with some badly behaving Flash content. The debugging process involved some extensive use of google and brought out a few interesting facts, which I thought would be good to be put together into a coherent story.

Webpages that embed Flash together with other layers of Web page content generally suck – in particular on Linux. It’s not the Web design that sucks – in fact: being able to use “depth” in a Web page is actually really nice for fitting more content on a page without making it too crowded (or hammering those flash ads at us – sigh).

Indeed, it is the technology that sucks because Flash on Linux doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Flash misbehaves on Linux by being bullish and always trying to stay dominant in the foreground over the top of DHTML content, even though being told not to. Don’t be prejudiced though: it’s not Adobe’s fault – or at least “not only”.

Before we try to teach Flash good manners, let’s first understand the problem.

When you embed an Adobe Flash 9 swf file in a Web page, Adobe provides a parameter called “wmode” (windowless mode), through which Flash is being told to be either “transparent” or “opaque”, either of which will prevent a Flash from playing in the topmost layer and allow you to adjust the layering of the movie within other layers of the HTML document. Layering in HTML is done by using the z-index.

Now, using wmode and “transparent” teaches Flash good manners on most operating systems. However, when the Flash ends up on a Linux computer, it’s old dominant personality returns and it turns evil again.

Yes, it is a bug. However, it is quite an interesting and long-standing bug – and longer-standing in Mozilla than other Linux Web Browsers, too.

Here is the story: On the 12th April 2002, Braden registered Bug 7189 with Mozilla about window-less plugin support on X. It was soon established that in principle window-less support is possible on Linux and the bug was re-focused on Flash. It turned out that multiple levels of fixes were necessary to get this working: at first, X needed window-less plugin support – a patch to fix this was provided by Dec 2004 by Pete Collins. Next thing necessary was support by Adobe to have an active “wmode” parameter, which was provided by end 2006. In April 2007 finally there was a first patch for Mozilla. A later patch was finally applied to trunk on July,2nd 2007. W00t!!

So, while we are all waiting for this patch to make it into Firefox and Linux distributions, to finally end up on our Desktop and make Flash behave, there is indeed a way for keen Web developers around this problem. And I can’t believe I’m actually going to say this: iFrames were the answer to our problem in my July’s blog post – and iFrames are again the answer here. Evil, detested, but oh so useful iFrames. Who would have thought…

Foundations of Open Media Software 2008

Digital Media, FOMS, LCA, Open Source

Good news, everybody: We are repeating the successful open audio/video developer workshop in 2008 – the CFP for FOMS 2008 is now public!

FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software) will again take place in the week ahead of LCA (Australian’s Annual Conference for Linux and Open Source Developers) – whose CFP is also out. Get started submitting abstracts because LCA’s published deadline for submissions is 20th July.

To complete the pack, LCA MultiMedia is an a/v miniconf for LCA in planning, such that LCA attendees will also have a chance to hear the latest and most exciting news from the developer bench.

FOMS 2007 was a huge success. It brought face-to-face some of the core Linux audio and video developers, which promptly started attacking some of the key obstacles for an improved audio/video experience on Linux and with open media software in general.

Jean-Marc Valin (author of speex), Lennart Poettering (author of PulseAudio) a group of programmers from Nokia and a few others started designing libsydneyaudio – a library which is deemed to solve the mess of audio on Linux in a means that is also cross-platform compatible.

Also, a community started building around liboggplay, a library designed to allow drop-in playback of Xiph.Org media in an application. libogg is currently being prepared for a submission to Mozilla to provide native Ogg (and Annodex) support inside Firefox as part of the new HTML5 <video> tag. Then, Ogg Theora, Vorbis & Speex will play out of the box on a newly installed Firefox without requiring to install any further helpers software.

These are just the highlights from FOMS 2007 – expect more exiting news from FOMS 2008!

YouTube’s new player misses the point

Digital Media, vquence

Last week, YouTube brought out a new flash video player. The player had thumbnails of related videos from YouTube content included directly into the embedded video as you moused over it. This provides access to other YouTube videos through any embedded video.

People who have seen what we do over at Vquence noticed the similarity in the user interfaces. They also assumed that therefore the functionality must be the same. However, quite the opposite is true.

YouTube is a video hosting site. People upload videos there to publish them and most probably to re-embed them into their own websites. When you use video hosting, you don’t want your video hosting provider to suddenly display other videos on top of the one you have embedded, since that changes the perception of the page that you have created around the video.

Indeed, YouTube had to take back the mouse-over functionality one day after they introduced it because their users gave them negative feedback.

In contrast, Vquence is a video aggregator. The Vquence video player is for “playlists” (rather: slicecasts or vquences) of videos collected from multiple hosting sites. So, when you embed the Vquence player, you expect display of and easy access to all the videos in the slicecast. It is a very different concept: the aim is not the embedding of a video, but rather the recommendation of multiple videos to your readers. Vquences enable you to share your bookmarked videos in a viewer-friendly fashion. It’s not about embedding videos in your page – it’s about providing hyperlinks to videos by using videos.

Annodex codefest / liboggplay release

Digital Media, LCA

For all those open media codec lovers out there: mark 16th June in your calenders – you’ll be able to take a sneak preview at liboggplay!

liboggplay is a library that enables applications (such as Firefox) to provide native decoding of remotely hosted Ogg Theora and Annodex files.

And to celebrate the occasion – and to help everyone get started on including the functionality into their apps – there’s a celebratory codefest:

16th June, 10am, Macquarie University, Sydney
see http://trac.annodex.net/wiki/AnnodexCodeFestJun07 for details.

Vquence Teaser Site goes online

Digital Media, vquence

Last week, we put a new front page on http://www.vqslices.com/, which shows off the concept of “vquences”. A vquence is essentially a collection of video bookmarks presented as a “video mash-up” and in an embeddable “widget”. Or without bullshit: we concatenate 10sec previews of the bookmarked videos into a playlist, which is embeddable into other sites. And since it’s embeddable – here is an example vquence:

This vquence shows some snippets from Missy Higgins videos – she’s such a great singer! If you cannot see it here (due to planet sanetisation), go to http://www.vqslices.com/vq/dXelFQeQCr3kFQaby-aaea .

Vquences are a powerful concept and we’re right now working on the beta website, which will bring authoring to you out there, so you can create your own vquences. Also, we are working towards providing a REST API to register sites with Vquence, and RSS feeds, so you can always keep up to date on the latest vquences. Lot’s of other developments in the pipeline here…