A high-definition video standard for free-culture video distribution.

In 2012, I decided to change over to the Matroska/VP8 standard for the video, which has yielded a much-improved video quality (and I've actually got tools to measure that now, instead of just subjective appearance). These articles are repeating the same steps as in the 0.2 prototype, but for this new 0.3 version -- which requires a lot of different tools:

Articles for "0.3" Prototype (in Free Software Magazine

I have been documenting my progress on the 0.3 prototype in my column at FSM:

I documented the process of creating the "Sintel" prototype disk in my column at Free Software Magazine. Here are links to the individual articles:

Five ideas for escaping the Blu-Ray blues

Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I’ve been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out, mostly because Richard Stallman said it has an evil and oppressive DRM scheme. After my first serious investigation, I can confirm his opinion, and frankly, it’s a pretty bleak situation. What can we do about it? Here’s five ideas for how we might release high definition video.

Understanding Surround and Binaural Sound

Film soundtracks are usually made available in either “Stereo” or “5.1 Surround” sound, although other possibilities exist. Quite a few of the source sound recordings I’ve been using are “binaural” recordings, which sound eerily realistic over earphones, but often less impressive when played back on speakers. What does this stuff mean, and how can I use free software tools to make the most of it? This will be an ongoing learning experience, but I want to start with a brief description of these most common technologies, and how they are supported by the file formats we have available to us: Vorbis, FLAC, and WAV.

Assembling Ogg Soundtracks for an Ogg Video with Audacity, VLC, and Command Line Tools

Ogg Vorbis and Ogg FLAC (the Ogg stream version of the Free Lossless Audio Codec) are popular free-licensed and patent-free codecs for handling sound. These are the formats I’ll be using in a complex Ogg Theora video file that I am creating as part of my “Lib-Ray” experiment in creating an alternative format for distributing high definition video. In order to do this, I’ll need to solve several technical challenges using the FLAC command line tools, Audacity, and VLC, which I’ll demonstrate here.

Assembling Video from a PNG Stream for an Ogg Video with png2theora

Ogg Theora is the codec of choice for free-licensed, patent-free video, and so that is the one I’ll be using in my experiment in creating an alternative format for distributing high definition video. The original, full-quality animation for “Sintel” is provided as a series of PNG images representing each frame, and so I’ll need to turn that into a high-quality Theora video stream for my prototype “Lib-Ray” version of “Sintel”. In this column, I’ll show how I do that.

Creating Subtitles from SRT Sources for an Ogg Video with kateenc

One of the more interesting aspects of Ogg Video is that it allows an essentially unlimited number of subtitle tracks to be included. This is especially useful for free-culture videos, since they are generally released globally, and there are often contributed subtitles. In fact, for “Sintel”, I was able to find 44 subtitle files. I will be including them all as Ogg Kate streams in my prototype “Lib-Ray” version of “Sintel”, and in this column I will demonstrate the use of several command line utilities useful for this, especially the kateenc tool for creating the streams.

Assembling and Testing a Complex Ogg Theora Video with Command Line Tools and VideoLAN Client (VLC)

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few years, you probably know about the free multimedia codecs with the fishy-sounding names from Xiph.org: Ogg Vorbis (for sound) and Ogg Theora (for video). You might be less familiar with other family and friends, including FLAC (lossless audio), Skeleton (metadata stream), and Kate (subtitles). However, together this collection of codecs can be used with the Ogg container format to provide all of the functionality of a DVD video file — multiple soundtracks, full surround sound, high definition, and selectable subtitles. Having created the various streams for a prototype release of “Sintel” in my last few columns, I’m now going to integrate them into a single video file and test it with some players.

Emulating disk menus with HTML5 and Chromium for Lib-Ray

The final (and probably most interesting) step in creating my Lib-Ray prototype (for releasing high-definition video without DRM or other anti-features) is to make a disk menu system to access the video data that I’ve already prepared. This column will actually document my second prototype design, as opposed to the first prototype which I presented at Texas Linux Fest in April 2011. This second is a big improvement and conforms much better to the draft HTML5 standard from the WHAT Working Group, and is much more functional in the existing Chromium browser, although improvements are still needed.