User: Yaco/OpenVideo project

This page contains information about Franco Iacomella aka yaco plan for FSF Internship work.

Intern background

Franco Iacomella studies and research in the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), in Argentina. He is focused in project design and visual communication; writing and reading about political designs. He is also involved in social and political projects related with public access to knowledge and cultural diversity.

He works in FLACSO (Latin American School of Social Sciences), is consultant for the Universitat Oberta of Catalunya (UOC), teaching in the Free Software Master Degree and is involved in the Free Technology Academy iniciative. He has been working in the "Free/Open Culture" field for the last 8 years, being a member-contributor of a big number of world wide known institutions, projects and initiatives like: GNU Project, Free Software Foundation Latin America, Free Software Foundation, Gleducar NGO, MIA, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Free Knowledge Institute, Open Web Foundation and others.

Work plan at FSF

Open File Formats: Open Video Campaign

About Open File Formats

Introduction to the Open Video Campaign

As video and communication technologies matures, we face a crossroads: will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Video culture holds tremendous potential, but limits on broadband, playback technology, creation knowledge, and fair use threaten to undermine the ability of individuals to engage in dialogues in and around this new media ecosystem.

YouTube and other online video applications are rightly celebrated for empowering end-users; however, online video lacks some of the essential qualities that make text and images on the web such powerful tools for free speech and technical innovation. Email, blogs, and other staples of the open web rely on ubiquitous and interoperable technologies that have low barriers to entry; they are massively decentralized and resistant to censorship or regulation. Video, meanwhile, relies on centralized distribution and proprietary technologies which can threaten cultural discourse and innovation.

Open Video is about the legal and social norms surrounding video culture. It's the possibility to give to every person to use the video language to express itself. It's about the mediums to publish the different expressions and visions of the world. It’s the ability to attach the license of your choice to videos you publish. It’s about media consolidation, aggregation, and decentralization. It’s about cultural diversity. It's about giving the control of images and imagination back to people where creation, distribution and new ideas have no limit.

What is Open Video?

Open Video is a broad based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s more to Open Video than open codecs. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

The Open Video Alliance defines the Open Video in the following way:

The Principles for an Open Video Ecosystem are a technical road map for a more decentralized, diverse, competitive, accessible, interoperable, and innovative future of video. We foresee more democratic, ubiquitous use of video—making it comparable to text and images today. The Principles cover the following topics:

Authorship and Viewing — Video creation, editing, and playback tools should be ubiquitous, easy to use, accessible, and available in free and open source implementations
Open Standards for Video — Video standards (formats, codecs, metadata, etc.) should be open, interoperable, and royalty free
Open Distribution — Software platforms should support open standards and open licenses. Networks must remain neutral.
A Rich, Participatory Culture — Laws governing intellectual property must not discourage participatory culture. By default, video content must be available without technological barriers or access constraints.
Civil Liberties and Basic Rights — People should have the right to participate in a democratic culture, the right to privacy, freedom of expression, freedom from censorship, non-limiting terms of service, and the right to self-distribution.

The OGG fight

What is OGG?

In the field of Open Formats for video and audio there is a high quality development called OGG. It is a free, open standard container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation to use in multimedia, mainly in video and audio. The creators of the OGG format claim that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.

The name ‘Ogg’ refers to the file format which can multiplex a number of separate independent free and open source codecs for audio, video, text (such as subtitles), and metadata.

Why it is important to support and promote OGG?

Some reasons on why to support the open video and audio format OGG:

No Patent Restrictions:
- Unlike MP3, Flash Video, MOV (H.264) and many others OGG is not restricted by patents. Microsoft had to pay $1.5 billion after being sued for using MP3 without a license. With OGG, they would have been safe! These patent lawsuits might never affect you directly, but they create a culture where creative and skilled individuals cannot develop multimedia software without fear of being legally attacked. Using Ogg is one way to support them in their efforts and to encourage a better culture.
Supporting OGG leads to Free Software:
- RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and other popular formats require people to use non-free software: controlled by companies, not by the users. The companies that control the software design it to restrict the users and spy on them. If you choose Ogg Vorbis (audio) and Ogg Theora (video), you can listen to audio and stream video using many different media players, including free software that respects your freedom.
Great technical features
- You don't lose any technical quality with Ogg. It can compress down audio files to a smaller size than MP3 while still sounding good. OGG can be also used to stream audio and video online, allowing hi quality broadcasting and enabling anyone to express itself without need to pay patent royalties, expensive software or forcing other to use privative technologies.

OGG role in online video

Since some years ago video content in Internet is a commons thing. Far now, the technologies used to embed and playback video online was propietary tools covered my patents. Software like Adobe Flash used by YouTube.com site or Microsoft Silverlight corrupt the fundamental idea of net neutrality.

We need to support open standards for online video. OGG was proposed years ago to become the video standard for web in the HTML 5 language specification. Many organisations that supports neutrality, interoperability supported the idea, but the recommendation was removed from the HTML 5 specification because of the pression of provate companies like Apple, Adobe and Nokia (more information about this issue).

Nowadays we must promote and support OGG and Open Standards for video in the web. We must spread the word about the importance of this issue so the web browser developers choose the open video option and implement OGG. Mozilla, the foundation behind the famous Firefox is already supporting OGG in the new version of its browser.

A freely implementable open standard (which the Ogg formats are) for video and audio coding can:

have the potential for universal acceptance, creating a "baseline format" that everyone is both able and permitted to use without restrictions (legal, technical, what so ever).
enable browsers to handle playback. Straight-forward embedding with HTML 5 will facilitate this.
keep web content out of "plugin prison". This is a consequence of the above. Plugin prison refers both to the limitations of existing browser plugins and the dependence on them:
- The format will be specified, not the plugin, so one can for example take advantage of the best playback implementation on a given platform, instead of depending on being blessed by a commercial third party.
- Dependence on specific closed source software to use (fetch, decode, etc) a file goes against the principle to "own your data", which arguably also applies to the (potential) recipents of the file.
lower the bar for amateur publishing. Free software encoders and straight-forward HTML 5 embedding will require less effort and money than becoming an actionscript programmer.

Our work in FSF OGG Campaign will try to achieve an extensive support of OGG in web browser and raise awareness about the importance of neutral web technologies.

Campaign actions

Holmes Ideas

Finishing our own publishing workflow for ogg video
Some improvements to audio-video.gnu.org to take advantage of HTML5

Activist process for convincing big video sites to support Ogg.
Email campaign to audio and video publishers to support Ogg / HTML5. Petitions to youtube and other sites, building a list of passionate supporters who can then persuade targets (large and small) to switch or take transitional steps.
"Pre-roll" campaign... make a THX-style graphic for Ogg ("e.g. Free formats, where available") that can be included using javascript.
Badges for sites that support Ogg/HTML5
Discussion about publishing tools, start conversations about how to make posting Ogg/HTML5 easier.
Get a few internet video ad companies on board with Ogg/HTML5 (not sure if FSF cares, but I personally think it's a big blocker).

More Ideas

Hacer un sitio web, desde donde se puedan realizar todos o la mayoría de los puntos propuestos por Holmes.
Generar material audiovisual para difundir la campaña, y colgarlo en la web bajo un reproductor Ogg, y mostrar como se implementa.
Generar material informativo acerca del tema tanto para la web como para aquellos que quieran dar charlas informativas.
Crear banners para sitios que apoyen la campaña.
Organizar algún evento para difundir la campaña y al mismo tiempo producir material para que el evento pueda realizarse en diferentes paises.
Armar un calendario de acciones para peticiones a distintas empresas que utilizen video online.
Pensar como introducir el tema en realizadores de cine documental y de ficción.
Trabajar puntualmente con Universidades Públicas en carreras relacionadas con la creación audiovisual.
Implementación de Ogg desde los gobiernos (ej latinoamerica), relación con las trasmisiones online (streaming).

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