TheyWorkForYou Wants YouToWorkForThem

Talking of wisdom of crowds, here's one of my favourite sites, TheyWorkForYou, attempting to harness it in order to make politics more transparent:

Video speech matching

TheyWorkForYou has video of the House of Commons from the BBC, and the text of Hansard from Parliament. Now we need your help to match up the two.

We've written a little Flash app where you can (hopefully) match up the written speech being displayed to what's playing on the video. We'll then store your results and use them to put the video, timestamped to the right location, on the relevant page of TheyWorkForYou.

Web 2.0 at its best.

Open Hardware: Soon to be Boring

The New York Times has a feature on the Neuros OSD (for open source device):

The Neuros OSD connects to your TV or home theater system and allows you to archive all of your DVD and video content.

Plug the Neuros OSD into your TV, connect your DVD Player or VCR, and hit play. Your movie will be safely and legally transferred into a digital library! It works with home movies too. Just plug your video camera into the OSD, push play, and your memories are digitized.

With the Neuros OSD, you can store hundreds of hours of video in one location (like an external hard drive), get rid of those bulky cases, put an end to DVD damage, and instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote. You can even transfer your video content to a portable device (video iPod, PSP, mobile phone, etc.) to watch on the go, or email your home movies to friends and family.

It runs GNU/Linux (of course) and Samba, but also features hackable hardware, as detailed on the company's wiki (where else?).

What's remarkable about all this is not so much that a company should be adopting openness in both hardware and software (though that's good), but that it should be pointing out the fact that it is doing so, and that the New York Times picked it up. That open meme is certainly spreading.

Dastardly DRM Plans for Digital Video Broadcasting

Alas, not many people care enough about the threat posed by DRM. But I suspect that quite a few care about their TV viewing, and the traditional freedoms they enjoy in that sphere. So maybe this chilling news will wake up a few people from their digital slumbers:

Today, consumers can digitally record their favorite television shows, move recordings to portable video players, excerpt a small clip to include in a home video, and much more. The digital television transition promises innovation and competition in even more great gadgets that will give consumers unparalleled control over their media.

But an inter-industry organization that creates television and video specifications used in Europe, Australia, and much of Africa and Asia is laying the foundation for a far different future -- one in which major content providers get a veto over innovation and consumers face draconian digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the use of TV content. At the behest of American movie and television studios, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is devising standards to ensure that digital television devices obey content providers' commands rather than consumers' desires. These restrictions will take away consumers' rights and abilities to use lawfully-acquired content so that each use can be sold back to them piecemeal.

From Elephant's Dream to Boy Who Never Slept

What makes a film open source? I've written before about Elephant's Dream, which is open source in the sense you can download all the Blender files that go to make it up. And now there's this:

Boy Who Never Slept is a free full length movie that anyone can watch, share, and even use in their own derivative works (open source).BWNS is about an insomniac writer and his relationship with a teenage girl he meets online. What begins as merely a friendship, evolves into an unlikely love wrapped in harsh reality..

There's a more thoughtful explanation, too:

In this sense an open source movie refers to finished video content released with a derivative license along with the "source" or original files used to create the finished video, are released with a derivative license as well. This allows a lot more ability for new artists to edit, remix, and evolve the original work.

Other items that may or may not be released along with the video content include the script or screenplay, the soundtrack, and the sound effects.

These source files are available here. (Via Enterprise Open Source Magazine.)