Censored postings

Subject: Internet Archive makes all videos accessible in Ogg Theora for OLPC

Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:27:21 -0800

From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>

The Internet Archive has a collection of about 185,000 moving images, including many cartoons and full-length movies that have fallen into the public domain. They offer full downloads in the best format they have, as well as "re-derived" versions in other (typically smaller) formats. They also added a Flash-based video player in the last year or two. The Flash player never worked on the OLPC because it uses the proprietary FLV codec. OLPC software supports the Ogg Theora video codec, but few movies had been uploaded in Ogg Theora, and none had previously been re-derived into it.

The Archive actively supports the free software ecosystem, and is now busy re-deriving copies of all their videos into both Ogg Theora and H.264 (mp4) codecs. So far they have many thousands of videos converted, and hope to have the rest done by sometime in January. This makes each of these videos easily accessible on the XO, by looking in the left margin for the download/stream link for the Ogg Theora version. As each is converted, it immediately becomes accessible at www.archive.org by XO users!

The Archive is also trying a hack that notices that the "OLPC" browser is connecting, and replaces the Flash player with a direct link to the .ogv Ogg Theora file. This allows stock XO's to play videos by clicking on the big Click To Play image. For example, try:

 http://www.archive.org/details/merry_melodies_falling_hare

For the kids, they've already converted all 84 cartoons in this collection:

 http://www.archive.org/details/classic_cartoons

You can also search their moving images collection for

 format:"Ogg Video"

to restrict your search to movies that have a copy available in Ogg.

Since many of these movies are dozens of megabytes or larger, it would make sense for each interested kid to download a copy, so they can play it over and over without re-downloading it. This would also make it play without stuttering, on a low bandwidth Internet link. Similarly, if Sugar supported sharing files, one kid could share such a movie file with their friends, rather than just sharing the URL and having each kid stream it and melt their network. Unfortunately, due to long-standing bug #2903, Browse doesn't support downloading of *any* file type that it knows how to display. Once the word gets out to kids in Peru and Uruguay about this archive, their long-haul bandwidth usage will probably rise dramatically until OLPC fixes this.

Firefox-6.xo can easily download ogg videos, but doesn't yet know how to play them. And it saves them in the filesystem, not the journal, which would be a positive sign if implemented Sugar-wide, but as a spot improvement it'll confuse some people.

       John