[Foundation-l] more thoughts on openness and collaborative media

Tue Jan 22 11:53:59 UTC 2008

On 19/01/2008, Shay David <shay.david at kaltura.com> wrote:

> First let's start with the understanding the problem space. Video collaboration
> is hard. Text collaboration is hard enough, audio harder, but video is really
> the 'black sheep' (for reasons I discuss below). Despite some promising early
> attempts, to date there simply is no open system for online video editing let
> alone one that supports collaboration in the wiki-spirit. Now you can look at
> this situation and say 'so what? who needs it anyway' but I think that anyone
> that has been paying attention to recent trends on the web knows that in  a
> YouTube era, rich-media is an essential part of the web and of culture, and that
> its share is only growing. if wikipedia aims to share with every human being the
> sum of ALL human knowledge, then we can't really dismiss the need to include
> video in that spectrum.

Indeed. It's horrifying when YouTube users have to resort to Windows
Movie Maker.

> To enable open video collaboration several challenges need to be overcome including:
> a. Technological
> the system needs to be able to ingest content in a wide variety of formats, to
> convert them all to one commensurable format, to be able to trim, sequence,
> annotate, and overlay content, and lastly to be able to store and stream large
> volume of huge content files efficiently, all while preserving metadata
> information for permissions, revisions, and attribution.

Yeah. A collaborative, web-based non-linear video editor. (Which is a
bit like calling a wiki a "collaborative, web-based text editor", i.e.
it doesn't communicate all the emergent effects which are the thing of
real interest.)

> b. Legal and openness-related
> to be truly open, or free in the sense of the free software movement, the system
> needs to do all this while overcoming three distinct problems
> 1. the tools used need to be open sourced
> 2. the formats and codecs need to be free of proprietary claims
> 3. the content needs to be licensed under free licenses that can accommodate
> remixing (which greatly complicates the notions of attribution, derivative
> works, and transformation)
> As mentioned above, there is no system that can do all this today.

Indeed. People who think this is easy starting from existing free
software pieces may well inadvertently be assuming it's simple because
they don't understand it. But it's not, in the same way GIMP really
isn't a drop-in replacement for Photoshop except when forced.

> not stuck in any point C. Building this system is doable and with the right
> support, it can be accelerated. When Richard Stallman set out to build GNU, he
> started with EMACS and GCC, not with the kernel. It took more than six years for
> Torvalds to develop the Linux Kernel. What was common to both of them was that
> they made their system compatible with the closed UNIX, giving an organizing
> principle to a disparate development environment. In much the same way, we hope
> that we can use Kaltura's existing system, that uses several proprietary
> components, in order to build a truly open system.
  [...]
> that is free. One would hope that one day Flash will be free. Adobe is seeking
  [...]
> The main challenge of this project is to take this code, and make it compatible
> with GNASH. We have been in touch direct communication with Rob Savoye and the
  [...]
> note that the editor and player are not simply tools to play or edit video. they
> are a whole framework that represents a new approach to video on the web. the
> editor embodies a new meta-data schema that allows one to describe a set of
> rich-media assets and operations on them such as transitions and overlays. it
> also support layers of dynamic data such as RSS feeds, or any other XML data
> streams.

Part of my job is herding horrible Java-based in-house software for
some small parts of the wacky world of video production, so I have a
bit of appreciation for what a big enterprise this seemingly simple
idea is.

(I suspect Java would be a better starting point than Flash - Greg has
detailed at length the problems with Flash in this regard.)

> that being said, for cases that are clearly infringing, the tools should support
> all the standard mechanisms that will help avoid inclusion of copyrighted
> material in the free content repository, and will allow the community to
> self-police, as it has done in the past.

As geni has stated in the past, Wikimedia is the Web 2.0 project that
respects copyright - we're downright paranoid about it. I think this
is unlikely to be a practical problem here, as editors will
relentlessly review every individual item going into any movie for
freedom of licence and compatibility of licence.

I'm sorta wishing the press releases hadn't given the news sites the
impression that this was rolling out on Wikipedia in the near or even
middle future - as Brion said, it's a great idea but will need to be
free all the way down. But it does sound like you're onto a big and
valuable idea here.

- d.