Christopher Blizzard » 2009 » May

dailymotion and open video

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:03:45 +0000

Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5. They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats. You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

I’d like to personally thank the wonderful people at Dailymotion, along with Paul and Tristan who helped bring this project to the point where it is today. Dailymotion has been an excellent test case for us because they haven’t just encoded with the formats that we support but also built a full-fledged player using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that looks, feels and acts like the flash-based players we see on the web today. They also make it possible to embed open video using an clever tag that loads the video content safely in an HTML page.

Standing on the twin pillars of the HTML5 video API and royalty-free codecs, the movement to bring open video to the web is well underway. Dailymotion, along with Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have all committed to start serving up open video. The free encoders are getting better and better over time and we’re starting to see more interest in the technologies.

Dailymotion, Mozilla and a large number of other partners will be at the Open Video Conference on June 19th and 20th. If you’re interested in talking with us you might want to come down to the conference and learn what’s happening with video on the web.

continued theora improvements

Christopher Blizzard — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:42:17 +0000

Monty posted another update on the work that’s been going on to improve the Theora encoder. It’s worth re-posting here because I think that it includes some compelling images and graphs that show you improvements. So I would suggest that people wander over and have a look at his update.

The headlines include:

1. They have made substantial improvements to Theora’s encoder. The images which I include below really show off the improvements in sharpness at the same bitrate.

2. ~~That the encoder is now creating higher-quality streams than H.264 at many bitrates~~. The data includes some comparison with x264 without ffmpeg bugs which show on this test that x264 does do better than Theora in this particular test. However, there’s an important side note worth reading on this topic.

3. That the original tests that gave Theora such a bad name were done with incredibly bad tools. See the squiggly line on the graph in monty’s post for evidence of that.

Anyway, a picture speaks a thousand words so I’ll include them here. Open them up in two tabs and switch between them for the full effect.

Theora 1.0:

Theora.next:

Monty points out that this was largely other people’s work and they should get most of the credit. So Greg, Tim and many others – thanks. Keep up the great work.

download rip: a remix manifesto

Christopher Blizzard — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:56:05 +0000

As posted by Lawrence Lessig, you can now download Rip: A Remix Manifesto. I had the chance to see it a few months ago at a private event and I really enjoyed it.

Another really great thing: you pay what you want for it. So pick an amount – $5 or $7 for example – download it and enjoy it. (I paid $20.) If nothing else the music is fantastic. Enjoy the trailer on blip.tv or embedded below.