Thanks to some funding from the alt-media-res project, we now have a draft metadata standard PDF prepared by JJ King and Jan Gerber:

This report and proposal is under consultation within Transmission-connected networks until Monday November 6th;

We are looking for substantive responses, feedback, proposals, in particular direct inputs from the other Transmission working groups - eg Translation/Subtitling, DoNoHarm, Aggregator R&D, Documentation....

I am posting summaries of responses in the wiki and hope that people with experience of this field of work can suggest practical ways forward to finalise and then begin to implement the standard.

After 6th November we will gather the working group together to review and improve the schema, spec out next steps etc. please add to and improve the metadata to do list

As part of this process, JJ King and I have drafted a proposal for implementation of this standard.

28th October 2006

1. Common Aggregation Site Why? To simplify the browsing and searching of all of our content for our audiences, to cross-promote our content and get it seen by more people and enable greater collaboration - what would this require each group to produce in order to contribute? RSS feed with text metadata - what metadata included? RSS2 with media enclosures - vodcast - what metadata included? - does it require a new collective to make it? Use Transmission site as basis of this Develop over transmission-discuss list or make a sub-collective for developers Look at Global Voices, are we doubling up?

Took me some hours, but there was nothing much to do while waiting for the PowerBook to encode videos, so, here it is: http://www.jeremiahfoo.com/blog/?p=354, pictures I took during the meetings.

I will try to compile the videos so I can start podcasting soon.

I thought I'd better at least get a couple of notes in here before I forget everything that's happened over the last two days.

It's hard to get a perspective of where things are at from where I'm sitting, I'm mostly comparing things to my own expectations. I think I was expecting things to move into being quite specific more quickly. What I am noticing instead however is that there is a lot more of getting everyone on the same page as regards each others projects and their general operations. This isn't surprising perhaps as it's (as far as I know) the first time so many activist online video distribution projects have sat in the same room. It's a bit much to expect everyone to just jump into coding and collaborating on software immediately it's much more a of a long term process. I think it will take 6 months to start seeing some real outcomes of what's going on here in Rome.

Jaromil and Eleonora wrote a research about video streaming, commissioned by dutch media institute Montevideo. It has not been published yet on the net, but Jaromil brought it, and it's licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.

jaromil explains that copy protection is a bad idea, and also a waste of time.

talking about streaming, there are two ways: on-demand and 'programmed' (live).

For programmed streaming, you can use Darwin Streaming Server (with MPEG4IP as encoder), or Icecast2 (using FFMPEG as encoder).

The research also talks about codecs, focussing on open-source codecs, and takes into account licensing/patenting issues. There are 2 open source codecs that are not discussed: Dirac (BBC) and Snow (ffmpeg related) because they're not ready.

Upcoming documentation is this:

Zoe, Rama and me (=maxigas) are compiling notes of the procession.

i am compiling a directory of people with images.

i would also like to post some pix i made.

Today i about presentation of people and projects and a roundtable on videodistros...

Pictures and stories about the meeting can be found at http://JeremiahFoo.com/blog/ in Mandarin.

using gstreamer-0.10 to stream DV video with audio via alsa, could look like this:

gst-launch \
 oggmux name=mux ! shout2send id=icecast.v2v.cc port=8000 mount=/theora.ogg password=hackme \
 dv1394src ! dvdemux ! dvdec ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue ! mux. \
 alsasrc ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! queue ! mux. 

I just thought I'd add a bit of silliness as the name of an album by a space-disco band I used to know just came to mind.. Perhaps it's the cleaning products and dust that are going to my head! Or perhaps I am floating around on a space-station listening to Grace Jones after all.. that would explain why Andrew, Andy and Agnese are dancing around me, doing the hustle in silver spacesuits.. I definitely have dust on the brain.

Transmission. I'm looking forward mostly to meeting people from other projects and learning about our different approaches to similar challenges. I think we have much to learn from each other, which will help in critiquing our current methods and help us all plan better for the future.