Uncensored Interview Releases 1000+ Creative Commons Theora Videos

Fred Benenson — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:31:50 +0000

Today, Uncensored Interview, a video producer and licensor of musician interviews, is releasing thousands of videos from its interview footage archive under our most permissive license, Attribution also known as CC-BY. Previously, Uncensored Interview’s library consisted of premium content available for commercial licensing, but now includes videos available via download in Ogg Theora, a free and open video compression format. Under CC-BY, users of the content are only required to give attribution to Uncensored Interview as the content source. The site is also creatively using our CC+ protocol to help users purchase permissions outside the scope of the Attribution license, such as the right to use the video unaccredited or for endorsement of a commercial product.

Below, find an example* of one of the more than a thousand CC-licensed videos you’ll find on the site where electronic musician Matthew Dear discusses his thoughts on file sharing:

Matthew Dear: The More, the Better.

You can find all of the Creative Commons licensed videos (with more to come) in the Creative Commons section of the Uncensored Interview site or subscribe to the feed of videos here.

* You may have noticed that we’re featuring video in this blog post. If you take a look at the source, we’re using the tag in HTML 5 to point to Uncensored Interview’s Ogg Theora file. If you’re running Firefox 3.1 (currently in beta) then you’ll be able to watch the video in the browser’s native media player without using proprietary software. If your browser doesn’t have Ogg Theora support then the embed will default to UI’s Adobe Flash player.

Cool open video news from Wikimedia

Mike Linksvayer — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:42:04 +0000

The most frequently used audio and video formats on the web are not open (they’re software patent encumbered), which has hindered the development of free and open source media tools. Open audio and video formats face a tough chicken and egg problem: not interesting to publishers if not supported in software, and not interesting to software developers if not much published open format audio and video.

Wikipedia and its media repository, Wikimedia Commons, have long been an important piece in this adoption puzzle. Along with only accepting liberal copyright licensing, they accept only free file formats.

Late July the Wikimedia Blog featured two hopeful items regarding open media formats. Both are still developing and well worth checking out despite this late posting.

First, an announcement that MetaVid lead developer Michael Dale has been hired by the Wikimedia Foundation:

As many of you may know, Wikimedia is working with Kaltura, Inc. to explore collaborative video editing in the Wikimedia projects. I’m very happy to announce that Kaltura has decided to support the further development of a 100% open source video editing solution integrated into MediaWiki. To this end, Kaltura is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in early August.

Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael’s work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF. I am hoping that we can make incremental improvements to Wikimedia’s video capabilities that will start to become visible to users soon.

This is really excellent news. MetaVid impressed when presented at a CC Salon two years ago.

Second, a post on news that Firefox 3.1 to support open video and audio. This post also has an excellent summary of why open formats matter for free culture. Go read it!

Creative Commons » theora

Uncensored Interview Releases 1000+ Creative Commons Theora Videos

Cool open video news from Wikimedia