What is Open Video?

This chapter aims to give a very short summary of what open video is. We include a working definition of open video we arrived at as part of the Open Video Forum and invite you to comment. We meet our first open video tool and file.

By the end of this task you should be able to:

• Understand a bit about open video concepts
• Play an 'open video' file

Tools you will need for this task:

• Internet Connection
• VLC Player - available for Mac, Linux & Windows
   

Recent debates about open video

There are many blog posts online which outline a tension between pragmatic and purist approach to promoting open video. Please have a bit of read of some of these blog posts. Don't get bogged down by the geek babble details but do get a flavour of the debate.

• Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate
• Idealism vs pragmatism mozilla debates supporting h264 video playbac
• WebM and broken promises

Our working definition of open video

As we started the course sprint we had a quick discussion of what open video meant for us in the context of our projects. The areas we agreed on were the use of Free Software tools for creating and distributing video and the adoption of freely licensed formats or at least formats using open standards.

To promote open video is it important to make material available in free and open formats. However, practically you may have to also provide versions in more restricted formats like h264 to reach users on closed platforms like iOS. This dillemma is a subject of many blog posts similar to those listed above. We can put pressure on vendors to adopt the use of free and open formats by using them ourselves.

The h264 standard is a big step forward compared to proprietary codecs owned and controlled by a single vendor like Real or Microsoft. While h264 may not be free of restrictions we can use free tools to create h264 files, take them apart and generally deepen our knowledge of the subject in general. However, h264 still requires anyone implementing an encoder or decoder and even anyone distributing a video in h264 to pay license fees for patents covering algorithms used in the format to do so.

For videos distributed on the web for free this restriction has been removed but if you sell or distribute videos on disks or broadcast you need to pay up. Free formats like Ogg Theora or WebM dont have such restrictions. The allow anyone to freely create tools and distribute content as they like. For more info you can read this article about The H.264 Licensing Labyrinth

Task: Play an open video file

While licensing and patent issues have a real impact and these things do matter, we want this course to be fun and practical too. When people argue about these kinds of esoteric issues easy to be reminded of the 'splitters' featured in Monty Python's Life of Brian.

As an fun activity download and play this short clip from the film provided as a fair use illustration of the point we are making.

Download WebM video clip

The clip is encoded to the WebM open format, so you will need to use a video player which supports open video formats to use it. If you are not sure how to do this then install VLC Player which is available here -  http://www.videolan.org

First Impressions?

What are your first impressions of the world of open video? Do you think that people should be pragmatic or purist about open video? Maybe you have questions you want to ask.  Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments.