Talk: Metavid & MetaVidWiki

Wikimania 2007 talk notes: “Metavid & MetaVidWiki” by Michael Dale

Basic idea: Video + wiki

Metavid:

  • GPLv2 license

  • Free database dump.

Currently seems focussed on US congress speeches.

Can drag and drop videos in a list of videos to make a play list.

Current Metavid limits:

  • Very focussed on US congress (because funded by a foundation who particularly care about this).

  • No way to collectively improve the meta data.

  • Not browser neutral (prefers Firefox).

  • Not very scalable.

Currently rewriting (got a grant / funding) to make MetaVidWiki, using:

  • MediaWiki (so an open wiki architecture)

  • Semantic MediaWiki (so proper machine-readable relationships between things).

Have 3 namespaces for wiki video:

  • Metadata (e.g. who is speaking).

  • time information (e.g. when speaker changes or starts a new chapter, etc.).

  • editing sequences.

HTML5 will include a <video> tag based on Ogg Theora. Will have compatibility with this, or can fall back to plug-in methods for browsers that do not support HTML5.

Saw an interactive demo – looks pretty cool – has a video playback window, plus a list of coloured timeflow to show the splices between video segments, plus a bit where people can have and edit wikitext about each segment of the video. Can also drag-and-drop the segments to rearrange video.

Looking to go live with MetaVidWiki (with a reduced feature set) within a month or two.

Link to talk’s page.