This week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads has just two pointers. First, a new volunteer web service to report problems with websites, which may be useful for not only our own sites but for the sites our patrons visit. Second, a nine-minute video that illustrates the reuse of themes and ideas in motion pictures across time.

If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Addressing Accessibility, from Fix the Web

Web accessibility is not improving very quickly despite the efforts of many experts. The scale of the problem is huge and there is a need for culture change amongst web developers and website owners.

Our solution is to make it super easy for disabled and older people to report problems with websites. Volunteers do the work of contacting the website owners and signposting them to support. In doing this work, volunteers will understand more about e-accessibility for themselves, as well as giving crucial information to website owners. Everybody wins!

Details of how the process works are explained for the different roles (volunteering and issue reporter) and in the FAQs.

You can get involved in three different ways:

1. Report issues you are having with websites.
2. Volunteer to help liaise with website owners.
3. Support the development of the project: contact the coordinator.

This project intersects with libraries in two ways. First, we must make sure our websites are available to all populations — including users browsing the web with alternate (large screen, color neutral, and/or audio-driven) browsers. (If this intersection is of interest to you, then check out the 1-hour webinar from Infopeople on an ADA Update: Revised Regulations for Disability Accommodations for the Public.) The second place it might intersect with libraries is assisting patrons browsing the web. Although reporting a site won’t fix it for that patron, if it is a common site for your patrons then reporting the issue will engage a group of volunteers that can help site owners fix the accessibility problems.

Everything is a Remix Part 2

An exploration of the remix techniques involved in producing films. Part Two of a four-part series.

Where did George Lucas get ideas for Star Wars? Watch this 9 minute video that shows side-by-side comparisons of Star Wars with movies that the creator of this video says were Lucas’ sources. The creator also describes other examples of ideas and images are drawn through film. This video is the second part (and latest available) of an eventual four-part series. [Via Ron Murray]

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.fixtheweb.net/more-about-being-volunteer on June 9th, 2011.

Another slow Thursday Threads week due to higher priority work duties taking precedent over scanning for trends. This week has a look at the explosion of video content uploaded to YouTube (which dovetails nicely with the Thursday Threads report two weeks ago about the record amount of internet traffic attributed to Google’s services), why the distinction between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ should be dropped, how telecomm companies want a piece of the credit card business, and the movement of Momento to an Internet Draft. If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Hours of Video Uploaded to YouTube per Minute

Over 35 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute to YouTube

Remember in March when we shared with you that more than 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute? Well, you continue to amaze us: you’ve increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week. Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.

Google reported this last week, and it is a scale of data that is very hard to imagine. Via Jason Griffey.

The Digital Natives / Digital Immigrants Distinction Is Dead, Or At Least Dying

Quite a lot has been written about how this [distinction between digital natives vs. digital immigrants] isn’t really substantiated. At the very least, the distinction is quickly growing irrelevant. Unfortunately, the idea is still uncritically accepted even in some journal articles, and perhaps used as an excuse or crutch too often for poor or ineffective teaching practices. The result may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but for teachers, not students. We currently teach pre-service and in-service teachers less technology skills than we do middle schoolers and high schoolers, perhaps because of an implicit belief that adults can’t handle anything more than powerpoint or a basic HTML page.

Although this article focuses on primary and secondary education, I wonder if the same could also be said about “digital immigrant” librarians? Via Dorothea Salo.

Big telcos aim to replace credit cards with smartphones

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have joined forces to build a mobile commercial payment network that will let customers use smartphones as credit cards. Dubbed Isis, the proposed system will use near-field communication technology to send encrypted data from smartphones to payment processors. The system will only be able to send payments over a short distance and the carriers say it is “being designed and built to include strong security and privacy safeguards.” The carriers expect that Isis will come online within 18 months.

When the big telecommunications companies come together and agree to do something, you have to know it is going to be big. In this case, the article describes a system to use your cell phone as a payment device. If they can keep it together, the next phone you buy may include this functionality.

“Memento” Submitted to IETF For Consideration as an RFC

The HTTP-based Memento framework bridges the present and past Web by interlinking current resources with resources that encapsulate their past. It facilitates obtaining representations of prior states of a resource, available from archival resources in Web archives or version resources in content management systems, by leveraging the resource’s URI and a preferred datetime. To this end, the framework introduces datetime negotiation (a variation on content negotiation), and new Relation Types for the HTTP Link header aimed at interlinking resources with their archival/version resources. It also introduces an approach to discover and serialize a list of resources known to a server, each of which provides access to a representation of a prior state of a same resource.

This last one is clearly for the techies in the Thursday Threads crowd. The official title is “HTTP framework for time-based access to resource states” and it is a way for a web browser to negotiate for a previous version of a web page. One way to think about it would be as an automated way to see previous versions of a wiki page. Or another way would be to see past versions of a page in the Google web index cache or in the Internet Archive Wayback machine. This submission to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the first step in making this function a reality, so for now just know that this posibility may be comming and keep an ear out for other mentions of Momento.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://ff.im/tDgkn on May 17th, 2011.

Although my day-to-day work takes me farther away from working with digital collections in general and JPEG2000 specifically, I still have a Google News search set up looking for hits on JPEG2000 topics. An entry appeared yesterday that gives some interesting insight into how motion JPEG2000 is being used in broadcast video transmission: “HBO Opens T-VIPS Video Gateways: Norweigan Vendor Helps Premium Net Ship Content Coast to Coast”

The article describes how HBO is using video gateways based on the JPEG2000 standard “to transport high-definition programming from its New York City studios to the HBO Communications Center.” The device, a TVG430 HD JPEG2000, encodes and decodes HDTV signals in motion JPEG2000 for transmission over gigabit ethernet. (Take a look at the data sheet [PDF] for all of the fine details about the product.) The article also describes some of the operational advantages and disadvantages of real-time motion JPEG2000 transmission:

For HBO and other clients, JPEG2000 has proven to have a number of advantages over MPEG formats for video-signal transport, Dolvik said. MPEG signals that are repeatedly encoded and decoded have much poorer image quality than JPEG2000 signals, and JPEG2000 does a significantly better job of error correction. In addition, the latency for JPEG2000 signals is about 120 milliseconds, compared with as much as two to four seconds for MPEG.

A downside to JPEG2000 is that it requires significantly more bandwidth than MPEG. This isn’t a major problem for sending content over IP networks, in which bandwidth has become much less expensive, but it is a significant issue for “the last mile” connection into homes where bandwidth is often extremely limited.

Very interesting to read, even if it doesn’t have a direct impact on libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. It does show, though, that JPEG2000 is gaining market share and mind share in other fields.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.t-vips.com/sites/default/files/datasheets/0409_Datasheet_tvg430.pdf to http://www.t-vips.com/sites/default/files/datasheets/Datasheet_tvg430.pdf on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.t-vips.com/sites/default/files/datasheets/Datasheet_tvg430.pdf on June 9th, 2011.

Thanks, Noel, and everyone else who made the video editions of Code4Lib 2008 presentations possible. I just had a chance to notice that the video from my JPEG2000 to Zoomify Shim lightning talk was online:

Some updates since the post and the presentation were first done. The code that exists in the source code repository now was refactored to use JJ2000 as part of the Sun ImageIO package. We were seeing non-threadsafe problems with Kakadu and thought that using the multithreaded ImageIO package would help. Unfortunately, even with extensive caching, it did not. My next task is to bring Kakadu back into the picture using the threadsafe JNI implementation that is part of the ImageIO-ext project to see if that helps.

Unfortunately, time ran out before this needed to go into initial production with the OhioLINK DRC roll-out, so it isn’t in production. The scheme shows promise, though, so I’m going to keep working with it…

The text was modified to update a link from http://jj2000.epfl.ch/ to http://code.google.com/p/jj2000/ on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to https://jai-imageio.dev.java.net/ on June 9th, 2011.

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we would get a preservation-worthy digital copy from the producer/distributor and forego the physical version.

There is quite a lot written on preserving video, but I wanted to distill the requirements down into statements that vendors could reasonably provide today. I think these are pretty sound requirements, but I’m looking for feedback. In particular, I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer of closed caption text from the publisher/distributor; suggestions are welcome.

[Jester's note: I just realized that an earlier version of this posting went out to the net about two hours before this "final" version. Sorry about publishing the work-in-progress early; I must have hit the wrong button in the new version of WordPress...]

File Formats

Guidance on the preservation of digital video should, by necessity, change over time. [...] The MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats are better suited to high-quality digital video. MPEG-2 is better known for its use as a format for DVD-Video, which encourages confidence when considering the likelihood that the format will be readable in the long-term. The format has an average transfer rate of 2-5 megabits per second, but there may be disk space restraints and the software tools necessary to convert and store this format are costly. MPEG-4 has a lower transfer rate of 1-2 megabits per second and is intended for streaming video. Other codecs, such as QuickTime, Windows Media, Real Video and Open DIVX, are useful for specific purposes, but not suitable for preservation. ¹

The Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats site has an entry for MPEG-2 (also known as H.262) and an entry for MPEG-4 (more completely, MPEG-4 file format version #2) that give the nitty-gritty details for the file formats.

The preservation master copies we want to store has a frame size of 720 pixels by 480 pixels. (That size is for NTSC format videos, common in USA, Canada and Japan. Master copies of PAL-format videos, common in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and most of Europe, is 720 x 576.) This is the standard resolution used in MPEG-2-compressed commercially distributed DVD movies.² These frame sizes are appropriate for analog video signals. (“As defined by ITU-R Recommendation BT.601, more commonly know by the abbreviations Rec. 601 or BT.601 or its former name, CCIR 601. [It is] a standard published by the CCIR (now ITU-R) for encoding interlaced analogue video signals in digital form.”³ ) The audio is 48KHz stereo at 224 kb/s or better.

Captioning Text

To make matters more complicated, a whole set of different schemes are used for DVDs. (On VHS recordings, closed caption text was encoded in one of the non-visible lines that make up the video signal. Since the DVD format only included visible lines, other schemes were required.) The most popular seems to be the Scenarist Closed Caption (SCC) format. This is a binary file that exists on the DVD along side the video files.

Resources Consulted

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/ to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/ on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/ahds-preservation-documents.htm to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/preservation/ahds-preservation-documents.htm on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/guideline_h.html to http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/accessible-digital-media-guide/guideline-h-multimedia on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Knight, G., & McHugh, J. (2005). Preservation Handbook: Moving Image. p. 3.
2. Audio/Video Capture and Management (2002).
3. “Rec. 601″ (2008).

Two items of recent note in the JPEG2000 world. The first is the announcement of “the world’s first fully integrated wireless HDTV” that uses JPEG2000 over the air:

The High Definition LCD TV, featuring Pulse~LINK’s integrated CWave® UWB Wireless HDMI technology, will be on display for the first time at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10. [...] With the integration of CWave® Wireless HDMI, digital display products can be mounted anywhere in the room without needing to run data cabling from the TV to the content source, such as a DVR, Blu-ray or HD DVD player, or a live cable or satellite feed. Video data is encoded using the JPEG2000 video codec, the same codec used by movie theaters for “Digital Cinema,” providing a secure high quality HD experience. Pulse-LINK’s Wireless HDMI solution is engineered to be equivalent in both content protection and visual experience to a wired HDMI connection.

Interesting that the initial take-up of JPEG2000 in consumer electronics may come from the video arena rather that the still image photography arena. (This announcement comes via a private communication with Ron Murray at LC.)

The second item is a paper in the February 2008 issue of Notices of AMS where David Austin explains how JPEG and JPEG2000 compress image data. It is a short (just over three pages) look at the compression algorithms from a mathematical point of view. (This comes via a posting in Entertaining Research.)

Update 20080108T1213 : Add to this now a posting by Jeff Mather that describes the various compression schemes and file formats that share the JPEG moniker. Do you think there is only one, or possibly two, “JPEG” standards. Read Jeff’s posting for an overview of everything that is out there.

Spotted in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online this morning is mention of two lectures by Wendy Seltzer that will happen today on the topic of copyright and fair-use doctrine. Here are the summaries and hCalendar events (the latter being useful if your browser and/or RSS reader understands the hCalendar microformat markup). Long-time readers of DLTJ might remember Professor Seltzer’s battle with the NFL over the overly broad statement about use of telecasts by posting a 33-second clip the SuperBowl on YouTube, which, at the moment, is still online.

It looks like previous talks from the Cornell University Computer Policy and Law Program are archived at the same website, so if you miss Professor Seltzer’s talks today you can catch them another day.

[Update 20070927T1230 : Fixed the ending dates in the hCalendar microformat markup. Sorry 'bout that.]

The text was modified to update a link from http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2412 to http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/cornell-u-prepares-a-pair-of-webcasts-on-copyright/3363 on January 20th, 2011.

A recent posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Wired Campus” section describes the new iTunes U portal, “a spot on the site that will collect college lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost.” (If you have iTunes on your desktop/laptop, you can use this link to visit iTunes U in the iTunes Store.) Now, according to the Apple press release, “content from iTunes can be loaded onto an iPod® with just one click and experienced on-the-go, anytime, making learning from a lecture just as simple as enjoying music.”

How about iTunes U as a content delivery platform for libraries. What kind of content could we put into iTunes U? Here at OhioLINK, we have the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics Recorded Sounds and Foreign Language Video Instruction that are open to the public. (Granted, we might have to do some file format conversions to meet requirements for iTunes U.) With more students and researchers using devices such as iPods and services such as iTunes U, as long as we are not entering into an exclusive agreement for delivering such content, why not meet the users where they are.

Here is something to keep an eye on. Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, is demonstrating the concept of fair use to her class by going head-to-head with the National Football League. Specifically, she posted a 30 second video snippet of the NFL’s standard copyright statement to YouTube on February 8th and waited to see what would happen.

As could be expected, Seltzer received a DMCA takedown notice five days later and the content is no longer viewable on YouTube. In response, she sent a counter notification exerting fair use rights to use the excerpt as an example of overreaching copyright warnings. (Getting dizzy from all of the claims and counter claims yet?)

So the ball is back in YouTube’s court as they are stuck in the middle between Prof. Seltzer on the one side and the NFL on the other. Check out the comments to the three above postings for a real interesting take on what has happened so far and keep an eye on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4uC2H10uIo to see what happens early next month.

[Update on 14-Mar-2006: The Chronicle of Higher Education has an update describing how the content was put back but, at this point in time, is now unavailable again. No word yet about why the content was pulled back a second time.]

The text was modified to update a link from http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2007/03/06/we_have_putback_super_bowl_warnings_back_online.html to http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/dmca-nfl#000441 on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2007/02/15/dmca_saga_act_ii_counternotification.html to http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/dmca-nfl#000437 on January 20th, 2011.

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player version 11, the Microsoft Media Server (MMS) protocol is officially no longer supported. (Except, of course, for the confusing/amusing footnote on that page that says ‘mms://’ URIs are “highly recommended” as a protocol rollover URL — only Microsoft can at the same time make something deprecated and highly recommended.) As Ryan Eby noted earlier this year, those generating ASX files for Windows Media Player need to adjust their scripts.

Last year I published an entry called Embedded Web Video in a Standards-Compliant, Accessible, and Successful Way on how to embed (without using the non-standard <EMBED> tag) video on an HTML page. It has been one of the most widely read articles on DLTJ.org, and so I wanted to publish an updated version of the script from that article to take into account this new wrinkle from Microsoft. The change is at line #41 below:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Copyright (C) 2006-2007 OhioLINK
#
# This file is part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons (DRC) Project.
#
# The OhioLINK DRC is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the Affero General Public License as
# published by Affero, Inc. -- either version 1 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# The OhioLINK DRC Project is distributed in the hope that it will be
# useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY -- without even the implied warranty
# of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# Affero General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the Affero General Public
# License in the LICENSE.txt file that comes with the DRC project;
# if not, write to DRC Development Team, OhioLINK, 2455 North Star Rd,
# Suite 300, Columbus, OH 43221, USA.
 
if (!$ENV{PATH_INFO}) {
  print "Location: http://no-path-info-given/\\r\\n\\r\\n";
} else {
  ($format,$id) = $ENV{PATH_INFO} =~ q#^/+(.*?)/(.*)$#;
 
  if ($format =~ /Quicktime/i) {
    print "Location: http://video.ohiolink.edu/blah/Quicktime/$id\\r\\n\\r\\n";
  } elsif ($format =~ /Real/i) {
    print "Location: http://video.ohiolink.edu:8080/ramgen/blah/Real/$id\\r\\n\\r\\n";
  } elsif ($format =~ /Windows/i) {
    ($winType,$winFile) = $id =~ q#^(.*?)/(.*)$#;
    if ($winType =~ /asx/i) {
      $winFile =~ s/\\..*$//;
      print >> "EoMarkup";
Content-type: video/x-ms-asf
 
<asx version="3.0">
<copyright>(c) 2005 - xxx</copyright>
<entry>
<ref href="mms://video.ohiolink.edu/blah/Windows/$winFile.wmv?SAMI=http://rave.ohiolink.edu/dmc/blah/windows/smi/$winFile.smi">
<ref href="http://video.ohiolink.edu/blah/Windows/$winFile.wmv?SAMI=http://rave.ohiolink.edu/dmc/blah/windows/smi/$winFile.smi"/>
<copyright>(c) 2005 - xxx</copyright>
</ref></entry>
</asx>
EoMarkup
    } elsif ($winType =~ /wmv/i) {
      print "Location: mms://video.ohiolink.edu/blah/Windows/$winFile\\r\\n\\r\\n";
    } elsif ($winType =~ /smi/i) {
      use LWP::UserAgent;
      $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
      $ua->agent("$0-lwp/0.1 " . $ua->agent);
      $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => "http://video.ohiolink.edu:8080/blah/Windows/$winFile");
      # send request
      $res = $ua->request($req);
      # check the outcome
      if ($res->is_success) {
        print "Content-type: application/smil\\r\\n\\r\\n";
        print $res->decoded_content;
      } else {
        print "Location: http://error-from-remote-server/$winType/$winFile/".$res->code."/".$res->message."\\r\\n\\r\\n";
      }
    } else {
      print "Location: http://invalid-Windows-format-given/$winType/$winFile\\r\\n\\r\\n";
    }
  } else {
    print "Location: http://invalid-format-given/$format/$id\\r\\n\\r\\n";
  }
}

Thanks to Neil Bennett at the University of Southern Maine for contacting OhioLINK about the problem, providing some very helpful diagnostics, and pointing us to the URL to the protocol table mentioned above. It is also worth noting that the A List Apart website posted a new article about sane ways of embedding Flash content that builds upon the same work in the original ‘Embedded Web Video…’ article. It might be time to update some of the techniques used in the original article, but that’ll need to wait for another time.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://blog.ryaneby.com/archives/windows-media-player-11-and-mms/ on January 19th, 2011.