News
Traveling to Birmingham and Atlanta
I should post my travel plans more. On Monday I’ll be in Birmingham, Alabama visiting a friend before driving up to do a panel at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in Atlanta on Tuesday. Holler.
Free Culture Conference this Weekend
If you’re interested in remix culture, digital activism, copyright, open tech, open access to knowledge, and/or free software, then come to the Free Culture Conference. It’s all going down this Saturday and Sunday (Oct 11th & 12th) at UC
Building, Building, Building
You may have noticed that there haven’t been a lot of big updates to Miro or the Miro Guide recently. Don’t worry, it’s the good reason, not the bad one– we’re building major updates that are getting close to launch. First you’ll see a totally revamped Miro Guide, then you’ll get Miro 2.0 [...]
Bandwidth Caps: Comcast’s Silver Bullet
In less than a week, Comcast will officially implement their 250GB bandwidth cap. It’s no surprise that they’re the first massive US service provider to pull this move in the home broadband market — two factors are significant: first is the pooled structure of their network.Second is the fact that Comcast is, first and [...]
Open Video Codec Report
After the exciting news about Firefox supporting Theora, the open video codec, I wanted to follow up with more good news. This is kinda geeky stuff, but it’s very important in regards to openness in video.
First, Dirac, the BBC’s experimental open video codec, recently reached version 1.0. The latest version of VLC will play Dirac, [...]
Attention Linux Users: Miro 1.2.7 Release
Many folks have probably already been notified of the 1.2.7 update via the Miro auto-updater. That said, Linux users don’t get those automatic notifications — and there have been some really great updates on Linux! Among the most exciting are
HD Detection Algorithm — Help Us Build It!
We’re working on a pretty cool system for detecting HD video, which has presented us with a small math challenge. It’s nothing too crazy, but we thought it’d be fun to see if anyone was up for helping us figure it out.
If you’d like to help with this algorithm, drop a comment here and/or contact [...]
What we mean when we say Open Video
As many of you know, the Participatory Culture Foundation is a 5013c non-profit organization — a media reform project. A fundamental part of our mission, and the reason we make Miro, is to spread openness in online video.
For many, it’s not clear what Open Video actually is — here’s what it means to us: [...]
Democracy Now! Producers Violently Arrested at RNC
Friend of Miro, Amy Goodman, host of the progressive news program Democracy Now!, was arrested yesterday at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Two of her producers were violently arrested before Amy rushed to the scene and was also taken in and charged. They have since been released, but none of the charges [...]
Ruling Protects Fair Use & Remix Culture
Recently, a federal judge ruled that content owners are liable for DMCA takedown requests made against videos that are fair use. In other words, copyright holders can be sued if they issue wrongful takedown requests against videos that are considered
5,000 Channels!
Yesterday marked 5,000 channels in the Miro Guide. It’s growing faster than ever (just a few months ago we hit the 4k mark), and is about to get better than ever.
Soon, we’re going to be rolling out a fresh version of the channel guide. It’s already looking amazing and more importantly I think it’ll help [...]
Make Your Video Less Ugly: Deinterlace
If you’re shooting video with a small camera (still digital camera, cell phone, or flip-camera), you can safely ignore this post. However, if you use a camcorder that is primarily designed for video, you should listen up!
What is
Democracy Now! is Sharper on Miro
If you aren’t familiar with Democracy Now!, it’s a great progressive news program that is syndicated daily across hundreds of outlets: NPR radio, public access TV channels, PBS, DISH (Free Speech TV), satellite (LinkTV), and more.
Democracy
Evulgo.org: German Language Blog on Miro
Yesterday, I noticed a few pingbacks coming from Evulgo.org; when I visited, I was surprised to see an entire blog dedicated to video feeds and Miro! The whole blog is in German (which I don’t speak), but as I skimmed I saw pointers to blog posts we’ve written here, along with a bunch of original [...]
Liberate YouTube Videos and Subscriptions with Miro
Rounding out a recent trilogy of YouTube-related posts, today I’m going to explain a little bit about finding and making RSS feeds for YouTube content. These tricks can free content that you’ve uploaded and subscribed to, from the confines of
Our personal YouTube favorites
Last week, I talked about the most popular channels on YouTube, but that’s only part of the story. As I said then, an unfortunate consequence of YouTube’s overwhelming market dominance is that content producers can feel compelled to publish there first, and sometimes use it as their only means of distribution. It’s fortunate, [...]
Open License Upheld in US Court
Professor Lawrence Lessig reports on a ruling that protects “open source licenses.” The opinion was rendered by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (they have the final say on US Intellectual Property disputes). The the provisions
YouTube Yanks Fair-Use Protest Video at Behest of International Olympic Committee
Last Thursday night, protesters projected human rights images including: monks being arrested, olympic rings turning into handcuffs, and so on, onto the side of the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan. Video of this event was uploaded to YouTube, and has
Volunteer Position: Be a Miro Guide Moderator
The Miro Guide is growing super fast — we’re closing in on 5,000 channels! As new channels are added, we test them out to make sure they work properly. Usually a team of volunteers takes care of this stuff, but lately it has been exclusively handled by our friend Robb. He has done an awesome [...]
How to Make Internet TV: Site Improvements
For anyone who hasn’t checked out our step-by-step guide to making internet video, visit MakeInternetTV.org. The website basically reads like a book and helps you pick a camera, shoot video, edit, and then publish — it’s pretty comprehensive and easy to follow.
For those who have already seen the site, you may want to take another [...]
Top YouTube channels now on Miro
The jury’s still out on YouTube. A lot of things are imperfect: no simple means of downloading videos, the comments on videos are usually absolutely ridiculous, and the audio/video quality, in spite of recent improvements, is still not great. In
The Participatory Culture Foundation – Living Up To Our Name On Twitter
We blog pretty regularly here about the bigger events and happenings of our organizational life, but if you’d like a more macro-view of what we’ve got going on, follow us on Twitter.
While we’ve blogged about it in the past and you may have noticed the recent revamp of our help section, we’re still actively [...]
Firefox to Support Open Video Format in Next Release
Chris Blizzard reports from this week’s Mozilla Summit: Firefox will natively support the Ogg Theora video format!
The Ogg Theora format is a codec (like .mp3 or .mp4), but it’s different than most. The majority of codecs make software
Migrating Madness: Moving the Help and Forums
We recently moved our help and support forums to a cool service called Get Satisfaction — they make it super easy to search for answers, ask questions, and see what other people are talking about. Signing up is easy, and your log-in works with other nifty company pages too. Our buddies at Mozilla are on [...]
Hiring: Ad Sales Director
Just as non-profit Mozilla is able to support it’s work on Firefox with ad deals like their partnership with Google, we are hopeful that over the long run the Participatory Culture Foundation will also be able to support itself and grow with business income. We have a couple experiments in motion that need an [...]
New Channels: Free Culture TV and Yes, We’re Open!
Hello again, I’m Parker Higgins, of the Miro summer team. Today I’m unveiling two brand new channels to the Miro guide. Without further ado, I present Free Culture TV and Yes, We’re Open! Free Movies, Music Videos and TV.
The goal of these channels is to showcase interesting and entertaining material from all over [...]
Miro Buzz: July 21st
Articles you might have missed in a convenient, click-able format:
Meet PCF:
This week Will Guaraldi will be at OSCON08 in Portland, Oregon
Miro Chat:
Team Miro will be hosting a live chat interview tomorrow with Chris Lyes
Spotlight on Video Creators: Ancient Places TV
This is the third installment in a new series of blog posts featuring interesting and independent video creators making an impact with online video. To accompany each post Team Miro will be hosting a live chat interview with the creator, this one to be held on Tuesday, July 22th at 4:30pm EDT (20:30 UTC — [...]
Leading German News Show Recommends Miro
Tagesschau, widely regarded as German’s most prominent news show, recently added Miro to their sidebar. This happened after NDR (North Germany’s Public Broadcaster) featured Tagesschau on their co-branded player.
This is all hot on the
Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video
The Center for Social Media just released a white paper with guidelines for using copyrighted material in online video. Fair use is often misunderstood (and rightly so, it’s a complex law), so I’m pleased to have a set of clear guidelines to point people to.
This is an especially great resource for anyone doing remixes, mashups, [...]