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.

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 Moloko Lab project by xm:lab, the conveners of this 'course sprint'. There is a project archive here – ovf.xmlab.org.

It became clear that there is currently very limited incentive to take up Free Software solutions in this area in African IT hubs. During the OVF 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 editors, journalists, campaigners and anyone using video who wanted to know more about know more detailed information of how it worked.

This course 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. The areas we agreed on were the use of Free Software tools for creating and distributing video and the adoption of free or at least codecs with open standards.

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.

Overview of contents

We wanted to start with contents that would be useful to a wider audience and then concentrate on taking knowledge deeper so that it would be a useful roadmap for new developers in this area. To do this we have split the course into two parts.

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 in this first section. The first section ends with a practical look at understanding and creating subtitles in the most open and accessible way.

Part two starts of with some information and examples about using open video on the web and a general look at online video technologies before going into an example of how you may move video metadata between different repositories. There is then a chance to dive into command line video encoding and manipulation with a gentle lead-in to that via some video datamoshing. As of the time of writing the section on video and mobiles is still to be written, maybe you can help out.  

Why haven't you included x?

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.

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

More About this Course Sprint

The course aimed to introduce the subject of Open Video to quite a wide range of students. Where possible there is an assessment task so that you can test and demonstrate your learning as you work through the course. There is more information about the process and the partners involved in this 'course sprint' later in this course. 

Assessment Task

Just keep going!