Petter Reinholdtsen

Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and notes are available on the Debian wiki. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME types I would expect to work with any free software player (like video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.

For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to be the only one fitting our needs. :/

As part of the work we do in NUUG to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a page with embedded video for easy access to the recording. Putting a good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all browsers and across all operating systems is not easy. I hope this will become easier when the <video> tag is implemented in all browsers, but I am not sure. We provide the recordings in several formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand. There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5 <video> tag, the <object> tag, the <embed> tag and the <applet> tag. All of these take a lot of options, and finding the best options is a major challenge.

I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from labs.opera.com, to see how it handled a <video> tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes. I was not very impressed. The browser start by fetching a picture from the video stream. Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is definitely very early in the recording. So far, so good. Next, instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all of it, but do not start to play the video. This mean I have to wait for several minutes for the downloading to finish. When the download is done, the playing of the video do not start! Waiting for the download, but I do not get to see the video? Some testing later, I discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able to get a play button to pres to start the video. Adding autoplay="true" did not help. I sure hope this is a misfeature of the test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the <video> tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start playing when the download is done.

The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is available from the nuug site. Will have to test it with the new Firefox too.

In the test process, I discovered a missing feature. I was unable to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video. I sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)

Jeg hadde glede av å overvære FADs lansering av Debattsentralen deltemeninger.no under Go Open 2009, og må si jeg ble skuffet over en kommentar fra podiet om ulovlig fildeling. Fikk ikke med meg hvem som holdt innlegget, men det startet med å snakke om ulovlig fildeling og gikk så over til å snakke om fildeling som om fildeling i seg er ulovlig. Intet er lengre fra sannheten. Fildeling er en nyttig teknologi som benyttes av NRK, Debian, Ubuntu, NUUG og andre for distribusjon av filer. Det er ingenting med denne fildelingen som gjør den ulovlig. Fildeling er i seg selv en fullt ut lovlig teknologisk anvendelse. Noe fildeling er ulovlig, og noe er lovlig. De som tror at fildeling er ulovlig har misforstått grovt. Hvorvidt den er ulovlig kommer jo an på hvem som har opphavsretten til filene som deles og hvilke bruksbegrensninger som gjelder for filene. En rekke filer er lagt ut av rettighetsinnehaver for deling på Internet, og fildeling av slike filer er fullt ut lovlig.

Aftenposten melder at nasjonalbiblioteket og Kopinor har gjort en avtale som gjør at eldre bøker kan gjøres digitalt tilgjengelig fra nasjonalbiblioteket mot at Kopinor får 56 øre for hver side som legges ut. Utvalget er litt merkelig: 1790-, 1890- og 1990-tallet. Jeg synes det er absurd hvis det er slik at Kopinor skal ha betalt for utlegging av bøker som ikke lenger er beskyttet av opphavsretten. Jeg antar her at det er mer enn 90 år siden forfatterne av bøker som ble publisert 1790-1799 døde, slik at disse bøkene er falt i det fri og enhver kan kopiere så mye de vil fra dem uten å bryte opphavsrettsloven. Bruk av slike verk har ikke Kopinor noe med å gjøre. Jeg håper jeg har misforstått. En melding fra nasjonalbiblioteket i 2007 tyder på at tekster i det fri ikke trenger avtale med Kopinor.

Et annet problem er at bøkene kun legges ut som bildefiler, noe som vil gjøre at søketjenester ikke vil finne disse bøkene når en søker etter fragmenter i teksten. En risikerer dermed at de blir liggende på en slik måte at folk som bruker Google ikke finner dem.

Da skulle jeg heller sett at nasjonalbiblioteket gjorde alvor av sin aprilspøk, og la ut bøkene som faller i det fri fortløpende.

Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage. I searched using 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:

Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and got these numbers:

I wonder how these numbers change over time.

I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if they are conduced in another country. Because of this, I did the same search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the search done from a machine here in Norway.

And with 'site:no':

Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these numbers.

The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few restrictions on the web, for example from his own site. I read the epub-version from feedbooks using fbreader and my N810. I strongly recommend this book.

Thanks to todays opengeodata blog entry, I just discovered that the OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten support for calculating routes. The support is still experimental and only available from the development server, until more experience is gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.

Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data was provided by Cloudmade, but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of the issue. I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support, and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the www.openstreetmap.org front page.