ginger's thoughts

Those who know me well know that a few years ago (in fact, almost 10 years now) we developed the Annodex set of technologies at the CSIRO in a project called "Continuous Media Web".

When Google bought YouTube in October 2006, I wrote a blog entry about how Google video is a hosting site and that with the purchase of YouTube, Google has the opportunity to turn the Google brand back to video search.

On Thursday, Ralph Giles announced the alpha release of Thusnelda, the next generation implementation of the Theora encoder.

The choice of a single great woman for this day was a really difficult decision.

Yup, we made it again!

Paul Rouget this week published another example implementation for using srt with HTML5 video with a javascript library.

Quick Press: the awesome guys from FFmpeg have made an official release this week.

Michael Dale from Metavid has posted an article on why we are about to hit the tipping point for professional video producers to move to open media codecs.

I have spent a lot of time recently researching Sydney-based agencies to invite to the upcoming Launch of our Vquence VQmetrics service.

Today I logged back into a Bebo account that I hadn't used in ages.

My grant with Mozilla on exploring the state and possible ways forward for video accessibility on the Web is over.

Yesterday I had a random technology developer email me with the question why he should use Ogg over other codecs that have a much more widespread uptake.

I am a slacker, I know - sorry.

In support of spreadfirefox.com, OZprod (no, they are not Australian, but French) this week released a video on Dailymotion that shows the cool stuff you can do with a video tag and Theora support in Firefox.

It is clear that there is resistance by established video technology vendors to support open and patent-unencumbered media codecs over and on top of codecs that are either proprietary or are covered by a registered patent portfolio, in particular since No…

During the LCA 2009 Multimedia Miniconf, I gave a talk on video accessibility.

Today, Wikimedia and Mozilla announced a grant provided by the Mozilla Corporation towards maturing the support of Ogg in the Firefox Web browser.

I spent the last few days doing some nice research for Vquence, where I was able to watch lots of videos on YouTube.

The "Open Source Developer Conference" 2008 took place in Sydney between 2nd-5th December.

During the last week, I made a proposal to the HTML5 working group about how to support out-of-band time-aligned text in HTML5.

Pia posted details about a OLPC rollout to PNG for February 2009.

In September, as reported, Terry Cutler delivered an extensive review on the Australian innovation system and what should be done.

As part of my accessibility work for Mozilla and Xiph, it is necessary to define how time-aligned text such as subtitles, captions, or annotations, are encapsulated into Ogg.

Recently, I noticed an increasing number of videos on YouTube were no longer available - even if they had just been shared through a blog post by friends or even if they were the main video on a producer's YouTube page, such as QuantumOfSolace.

Today, there were so many news that I can only summarise them in a short post.

In the media fragment working group at the W3C, we are introducing a standard means to address fragments of media resources through URIs.

While the open source codec "Theora" has been available since 2004 in a stable format, the open source community is very careful about giving any piece of software the "1.0" stamp of quality and libtheora has been put under scrutiny for years.

I spent last week in France, near Cannes, at the W3C TPAC meeting.

Nathan Willis wrote a very comprehensive article on our accessibility work for Ogg.

Ian Hickson, the main editor of the new HTML5 specification, gave a talk about some of the cool new features in HTML5 and some of the early implementations of these features in different browsers.

Ogg has struggled for the last few years to recommend the best format to provide caption and subtitle support for Ogg Theora.

Over at the Vquence metrics blog, I have just posted a blog post for this week that summarises all the features a publisher and reader can use on YouTube.

Yesterday was a long and fascinating day of discussions about innovation in Australia.

Today, three of the worlds that I am really engaged in and that tend to not have much in-common with each other seemed to come to a sudden overlap.

The IETF has just ratified RFC 5334 "Ogg Media Types", which I have co-authored.

Have you ever been haunted by an old open source package that you wrote once, published, and then forgot about?

The Foundations of Open Media Software workshop has just extended its deadline for submission of registrations requests with travel sponsorship.

liboggplay is a library that vastly simplifies the decoding and playback of Ogg encapsulated audio-visual content for programmers.

Mozilla have just published a brief statement that they have taken legal advice before they chose to support Ogg Theora/Vorbis natively in the Firefox codebase.

What a day for great news!

Julian Frumar used to be our Visual Communications Manager at Vquence until last year, when he left for new grounds and created a startup with two friends in Palo Alto called Omnisio.

...because of your outstanding contributions to Australia's computing sector, but haven't had the chance to put yourself out there?

I just tried comparing the different date & time selection plugins that are available for Rails and because the wiki page at rubyonrails.org is dated and I cannot edit it, I decided to write this brief blog post to save you the 20 min it took me to locate…

The W3C has just released a set of proposed charters for a new W3C Video in the Web activity with a request for feedback.

In our rail application we do a lot of string conversions to other data types, including Boolean.

I don't usually complain about companies and their sales approach, since I know how hard it is to sell things.

On Tuesday 24th June I attended the "Commercialising Video" conference held in beautiful Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney's harbour.

Today's Google Developer day in Sydney was quite impressive.

The Foundations for Open Media Software workshop will take place in January 2009 for the third time before LCA.

Yesterday, I gave a talk at SLUG (the Sydney Linux Users Group) about the open source software that we're using in Vquence.