DVDs, MP3s, YouTube, and other hindrances to free software

Update (2009-05-20): 1080p and standard definition videos of the talk in Theora/Vorbis are now available. See below for details.

I presented a talk entitled “DVDs, MP3s, YouTube, and other hindrances to free software” (abstract) today at FOSSLC’s Summercamp 2009 (#fosslcSC09) in Ottawa. Here are the slides:

• Slides made with S5. To switch to a scrollable view, click the 0̸.
• ZIP file of slides, including all CSS and JavaScript (29617 bytes)

Here are the videos (all videos are Copyright © 2009 FOSSLC, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada):

• Videos recorded on JVC Everio GZ-HD40U video camera (high-quality; recording was started a few seconds into the talk):
• Ogg Theora/Vorbis video at 1440×1080 (569 MiB). This uses a pixel aspect ratio of 4:3 so make sure your player’s aspect ratio is set to 16:9 if it looks squished
• Ogg Theora/Vorbis video at 720×540 (101 MiB). Also uses a pixel aspect ratio of 4:3.
• Videos and data created by the ePresence system (low-quality, include slides):
• ePresence page; Flash video with slides
• Ogg Theora/Vorbis video at 320×240 (75.3 MiB). This video becomes out-of-sync during the Q&A period, but should be fine otherwise. If your browser supports the video tag with Ogg Theora/Vorbis, the video will appear below:
• FLV Sorenson/Speex video at 320×240 (66.3 MiB). This is the source video used on ePresence page. I can provide details on how I transcoded it to Theora/Vorbis if there is interest.
• Extra data from ePresence page (slide images, XML data) (3.5 MiB)
• Slide timestamps XML file (part of extra data above). These would be useful for re-implementing the ePresence page using JavaScript and the video tag instead of Flash. If you have some code that does this, feel free to share it in the comments here. It is likely that such a solution could be easily adapted to work with other ePresence videos, including other FOSSLC videos.

Please feel free to re-encode or transform the above videos in whichever ways you wish. Besides syncing the videos with slides in a standards-based way, you may want to trim the videos to the start and end of the talk or re-encode them to a different resolution.

If you would like the source files for the HD version, which are in MPEG-2, please let me know. They are quite large (about 8 GiB in total) so I haven’t posted them here.

Slide errata:

• The “Why do we care?” slide should have mentioned the Gdium Liberty, a netbook that uses a MIPS processor, as an example of a product made by a small company, which does not have the resources to license Flash or codecs. Reducing people’s reliance on Flash and royalty-requiring codecs will allow many more products like this to enter the market. As it is, there are very few small companies making innovative new computers.
• The “What can we do about patented codecs?” and “What can we do about TPMs?” slides should have mentioned alternative music stores like Jamendo, which hosts music freely-licensed by the authors and offers it for download without DRM and in Ogg Vorbis format.
• The “What can we do about proprietary formats?” slide should have mentioned Free Youtube! and Free Slideshare!, which allow you to view YouTube and SlideShare without using a Flash player.