A Look at Open Video

This course is created for the School of Open as part of a 'course sprint' which took place at the Open Video Forum December 2012 in Berlin, a project convened by xm:labs to address the needs of African IT developers and film-makers. 

There are many reasons to get excited about the possibilities of open video. Don't just take our word for it, check out projects like Open Video Alliance, FOMS, Mozilla Popcorn and HTML5 Video projects. Rather than listing all the good things about open video now, we'll introduce them with examples in each task. 

This course answers a call for resources which can be used to encourage and facilitate Hackathons, workshops and self-study on open video technology.

Overview of course contents

We start with contents useful to end users of video technology. Then we go deeper including knowlege that we think will be of use to software developers. To make this clear we have split the course into two parts.

Module I - End User Technologies

We start taking apart video files to see what we find. We then take this further and start a more detailed take on licensing in chapters about Codecs and Containers. There are practical sections on creating open video files. We learn to understand and create subtitles in an open and accessible way and end by doing some video file manipulation to do some video datamoshing

Module one aims to be interesting and useful to video editors, journalists, campaigners and anyone using video.

Module II - Open Video for Developers

Part two starts with some information and examples about using open video on the web and a general look at online video technologies.  Following this some info on how you may move video metadata between different repositories. There is then a chance to dive into command line video encoding and manipulation. As of the time of writing a section on video and mobiles is still to be written, maybe you can help out.  

Module two has a primary audience as IT students learning about video and software developers extending their knowledge to work with video.

More About this Course

During the Open Video Forum forum it was clear the issue of Vendor lock-in and Freebie Marketing are widespread in the ICT world in Africa. Prohibitive software licensing costs for video producers and developers can be avoided by increasing the adoption of open standards and Free software. However, there is currently very limited incentive or materials to encourage the take up of FLOSS video solutions in African IT hubs. This course aims to address this and to provide a resource for a wider audience. 

Limitations of this course

In this first version of the course we do not cover video editing with open video tools. This is likely to be may be a part of a revised course. Also this course has been created in a very quick time frame. If we haven't included particular 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. Please make suggestions in the comments section or the Mokolo video list.

Navigating this course as a Student

We also cover a LOT of ground in this course. It is full of tasters of a wide vareity of subjects and case studies to do with open video. We aim to give you pointers to explain exciting areas of innovation and encourage you to download and play with particular tools. This is not a course you have to work though in a particular order. If you find a chapter too challenging or not relevant to you, skip on to the next.

If you complete part one of the course you can apply for your "A at Open Video" badge which is surely worth learning a bit of "nerd gibberish" to earn. 

Task: Introduce yourself and aims

In the comments section, introduce yourself to your fellow students. Share a little about your interests in this area. Why are interested in open video? What experience or expectations, if any do you have already?