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.

In creating the scope of the course we identified our primary audience as  IT students learning about video and software developers extending their knowledge to work with Video. We also wanted to structure the course so that the first half would also be interesting and useful to video editor, journalists, campaigners and anyone using video who wanted to know more about know more detailed information of how it worked.

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.

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.

There are pragmatic reasons preventing video developers from taking a purist approach to video distribution Free Software. We aim to support free and open standards by the creation of the course and other materials. While h264 may not we free of restrictions we can use free tools to take it apart, create it and deepen our knowledge of the subject in general.

There is more detailed information about licencing in chapters about Codecs and Containers.

About the Process of this Course Sprint

As mentioned this course was created as part of the Open Video Forum event. It took place on the Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th of December 2012. Many thanks to the people involved and to Soenke Zehele for pulling together the sprint.

Emeka Okoye (Vi­kant­ti Soft­ware, Nex­t2Us), Vin­cent La­goey­te (vil­laACT), Qui­rin Pils (Pi­xel­chiefs, mokolo.​labs), Jan Tret­schok (xm:lab, mokolo.​labs), Fua Tse (ac­tiv­s­paces, mokolo.​labs), Kes­ter Ed­wards (transmission.​cc), Mick Fuzz (FLOSS­ma­nu­als, V4C), Jan Ger­ber (Pad.​Ma), Hen­ri­ke Grohs (Goe­the In­sti­tut Jo­han­nes­burg), Robert (numm.org)

The process of starting the sprint was lead by Mick Fuzz from FLOSS Manuals. There are some comments from him below on the process.

I wanted to try and experiment of using some of the elements of the BookSprint process. BookSprint  create full books in 3-5 days with 6-10 participants in a very intensive process. It was not the aim fully replicate this for this event. However, while the outcome, commitment levels and timescale were different but the planning and structuring activities were similar.  The process of agreeing the scope, subject matter, chapter structure and allocating the chapters to writers was accelerated into a 2 hour process on the first day of the course sprint and we started writing after lunch.

After that process was completed, it's all easy going. We write individually but as we share the same space, discussions, suggestions, feedback and revisions happen naturally. As a facilitator, I know that the expertise in the room all I have to do is to encourage that interaction happen.

One of the observation by Jan Gerber who came in later on the first day was that the structure of the contents had a lot of similarity with Dive in to HTML5 video section. This guide which embraced the possibilities of HTML5 to use open video. He also pointed out that the licence was compatitble and could be used directly in the coures. This plugged a couple of chapters that were tricky to write and speeded up the process nicely.

There are also some placeholder chapters as the participants that suggested them were unable to complete them as they had to travel away from the course sprint and wanted to continue them later. These include What next for Open Video and the section on Open Video and Mobiles, so watch this space.

Why haven't you included x?

If we haven't included any specific projects or open video frameworks and you think that they are important to add then we would love it if you would help us by contributing to this course.

You can contact us and make suggestions via the P2P2 community email list, the School of Open list or the Mokolo video list.