• Part One
• A Look at Open Video
• What is Open Video?
• Understanding Video Files
• Creating Open Subtitles
• Understanding Codecs and Containers
• Tools for Creating Open Video Files
• Encoding Explained
• Part Two
• A Look at Open Video - Part Two
• Taking Video to the Web
• Video and HTML5 Markup
• Collecting and Moving Video Metadata
• Using ffmpeg and avconfv
• What Next for Open Video
• Course Process & Credits

About this Course in Open Video

The Open Video 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. There is a project archive here - ovf.xmlab.org.

(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.

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.

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.

About the Process of this Course Sprint

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 and the Creative Commons School of Open for encouragement. 

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

Many thanks to Jane Park for her constructive comments on the course. These have been integrated into the first version in time for the launch of the School of Open.