FLOSS Manuals is a great initiative that creates, maintains and gives access to a collection of manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source software. The manuals are friendly and simple, and they are intended to encourage people to explore the wide range of free, open source alternatives to expensive and restrictively licensed software. Since Open Images adopts FLOSS in general and the open video codec Ogg Theora and related open source software in particular, the upcoming Book Sprint looks very valuable:

We will hold Book Sprint about Ogg Theora in August (10-15). We will write a really good manual (book) about Ogg Theora in 5 days. The event will be in Berlin.

We want to cover a lot of stuff, but we hope to get our teeth into at
least some of the following :

about
-what is theora?
-why do you want it?
-codec basics
streaming
-tss (theora streaming studio)
-commandline ffmpeg2theora, dvgrab, oggfwd
-icecast
-gstreamer
-vlc
-jroar
transcoding
-firefogg
-ffmpeg2theora
-thoggen
-ogg convert
editing
-oggchopz
-pivitv
-oggtools
video conferencing
-empathy
-ekiga
-linphone
distribution
-wikipedia
-archive.org
-html5
subtitling
-cli embedding of subtitles in ogg
-web based subtitle replay with jquery.srt
playback
-vlc
-ff

We are keen to get anyone to the sprint that wants to come. There is
some limited travel funds…if anyone would like to attend please let me
know!

adam

The first Open Video Conference was held at NYU Law School on June 19-20. Eminent speakers and practitioners shared their thoughts on the emerging open video movement. The impressive line-up included: Matt Mason (author of The Pirate’s Dilemma), Yochai Benkler and Jonathan Zittrain (both Harvard Law School), Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing), Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Mike Hudack (blip.tv) and Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla Corporation). The conference was put on by Kaltura, Yale Internet Society Project, Participatory Culture Foundation, iCommons and the Open Video Alliance, in partnership with Mozilla, Red Hat, Creative Commons, Level 3, Akamai and many more. Open Images was also actively involved, as Sound and Vision and Kennisland hosted a session “Audiovisual Archives” that investigated how memory institutions could provide access their holdings in a way that enables creative reuse.
(more…)

Today we’ll give an exclusive preview of the Open Images platform at the exiting Open Video Conference in New York City. This preview is part of the Birds of a Feather session on Audiovisual Archives we are co-hosting. Read more about this session here.

Other interesting cases presented during the session are:

• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository
• American Archive
• MediaBurn

You can read our introduction here.