What is Open Video [Dec. 16, 2012, 5:43 a.m.]

About this course

This course is created for the School of Open as part of a 'course sprint' which tool place at the Open Video Forum December 2012 in Berlin. The forum aimed to bring together participants interested in open video in the context of a project called Mokolo Video being developed by the Mokolo Labs team

(en) For Mokolo.Labs, the development challenge for innovative video distribution is not low-bandwith, but bandwidth diversity and resource efficiency. A generalized user experience can only be achieved when reliable bandwidth data is available to developers. Often network carriers market their connection plans with “max bandwidth xyz”. We aim to assist developers through the creation of an African Video Bandwidth Observatory and invite partnerships with the MolokoLabs project in this effort.

Areas of interest: social viewing experience; crowd-sourced metadata & content curation; progressive download & adaptive bitrate streaming; test frameworks & user feedback strategies; accessible open source solutions for African video producers; low-cost server side solutions for video distribution; semantic search based on increased availability of metadata; connection of audiovisual work with cultural metadata.

The course sprint is a step towards the creation of a Open Video Handbook which we aim to create to address some of the needs addressed by the project. There is very limited knowledge and take up of Free Software solutions in this area in African IT hubs. There was a call from participants involved in Hubs for resources which could be used to facilitate Hackathons using open video technology.

This couse is our first response to this need. It has been created within a very short time scale and we hope online participants will be involved in helping us extend and improve it.

Our working definition of Open Video

As we started the sprint we had a quick discussion of what open video meant for us in the context of our projects.

Using Free Tools

We can use free tools even if we can't use free codecs all the time.

What is a Free codec?

besides having an open specification that allows anyone to implement there own player, encoder or other tool to encode or decode videos in a free codec. It is important that this can be done without requireing a special contract or patent agreement. While H264 is a big step forward compared to proprietary codecs owned by a single vendor like Real or Microsoft, it 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 codec to do so. For videos distributed on the web for free this has been removed but if you sell or distribute videos on disks or broadcast you need to pay up. Free codecs like Ogg Theora or WebM dont have such restrictions. The allow anyone to freely create tools and distribute content as they like.

While its important to make material available in free and open formats you might have to also provide version in more restrictive formats like h264 to reach users on closed platforms like iOS, where the vendors prevent there users from using free formats.

As we will read in later task there pragmatic reasons preventing video developers from taking a purist approach to video distribution Free Software. However we aim to support free and open standards by the creation of the course and other materials.