OLPC Ethiopia/Cultural content

Background

Melaku Belay and Zinash Tsegay (professional Ethiopian dancers) visited the ecbp offices in October 2008. They performed various traditional Ethiopian dances (featuring traditional dress) from different regions.

Nicholas von Wolff recorded videos of the performances. These have been cut up into various short clips.

A photographer took a number of photos of the performances.

All content is being published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license on the Internet Archive.

The project goal is to take these resources and produce free educational resources to be distributed on the XO laptops distributed within Ethiopia. In future, we aim to complement the media collection with audio recordings.

Andreas at ecbp on.e is the coordinator of the project. DanielDrake started the efforts for XO content bundling and wrote much of this page. Community involvement is encouraged and very much appreciated.

Recording and conversion

The dances were recorded in a makeshift studio at ecbp headquarters. The files were retrieved from the camera and cut up into several short .avi files (DV video, PCM audio). These were published on the Internet Archive:

[sorry, there has been a complication somewhere and we have been asked to remove the videos]

The videos can be converted to a resolution and format suitable for the XO using:

ffmpeg2theora -x 360 -y 288 -v 7 --nosound foo.avi

Sound was discarded as there was no music playing; these amazing dancers were dancing to silence!

Applications

Memorize games

There are a number of opportunities to produce Memorize games from this kind of media. For example, one game would involve matching the music (as audio) to the dance (either as a still photo, or preferably as a short video).

Audio notes

The best sound format for XO content is OGG Vorbis. On Linux I would use mplayer to convert the original sound files into .wav (assuming they are delivered as some other format), then I would use oggenc from vorbis-tools to encode .wav to vorbis. Here is a link to equivalent software solutions for windows.

After you have .ogg vorbis files, you can link to them using standard <a> tags from the HTML documents. Clicking on the links will cause the music to play within Browse using the integrated totem browser plugin.