Tech Blog

Looks like you can now login to the Internet Archive with an OpenID.

OpenID is super-useful, but unfortunately confusing to many people. When we upgrade wccatv.com to Drupal 6, that'll add OpenID support, and I wouldn't be surprised if around 1% of users took advantage of it.

Came across this related article today: Getting OpenID Into the Browser.

As we noted three weeks ago, the Internet Archive is changing the videos it "derives" from the original videos uploaded to the site.

Here's the official news. In short, they are now making Ogg Theora derivatives, and continuing to make higher-quality MPEG-4 videos.

There are also changes in the way thumbnails work.

They'll be deleting derived FLV videos, and the lower-quality MPEG-4 videos they used to derive. This is annoying, as there are presumably many pages out there linking to the old MPEG4s. (The existence of the FLVs was downplayed, so they're not such a problem.)

Here at WCCA, we need to change the "content type" (Drupal jargon) of our older video posts anyway, so this doesn't make much more work for us. Others may not be so lucky.

Due to recent changes at the Internet Archive, we've updated the Embedded Media Field provider file archive.inc.

As of this morning it looks like videos uploaded to the Internet Archive are now being converted into, among other things, the open OGV (ogg video) format. Pretty cool.

At the same time, the last video I uploaded was not converted into a Flash (FLV) format. There's still a Flash player, but it's configured to display the .mp4. Old Flash videos have not been removed.

The Drupal "archive.inc" plugin for Embedded Video Field will be updated to take this into account.

We've often written about "net neutrality" in the past. The OpenCongress blog has a great post today summarizing three attempts by Congress to come to grips with this issue.

WCCA's website was off-line for 2 days because of a small explosion/fire at the data center where the site is hosted.

If you want all the details, read more here.

It's great to be back!

Do you watch video on your computer?

Do you appreciate public access programming?

There's now a "Public Access TV" version of the popular video player Miro, which comes pre-loaded with several free channels of public access programming.

Click to download:

• Windows .exe (25MB)
• Mac .dmg (20MB)

If you are already a Miro user, you can click the button below to subscribe to all the public access channels:

(The list of channels is here.)

You can download this to Miro or another video player, and see all the cable access shows on the net, as they are posted.

Included stations:

• Worcester Community Cable Access
• Belmont Media Center (Google Video feed)
• Cambridge Community TV
• Davis Media Access
• Framingham
• Community Television of Santa Cruz County (also their Blip page)
• Manhattan Neighborhood Network
• Takoma Park City TV
• Willits Community Television (page at Brightcove)

If you are already a Miro user, you can click the button below to subscribe to all the public access channels:

List of all Public Access Organizations

Looks like there's some trouble with items uploaded to the Internet Archive between 10 and 30 days ago.

Here's the error:
"The item you have requested has a problem with one or more of the metadata files that describe it, which prevents us from displaying this page."

At least the items still exist; if they didn't the error would be "Exhausted all choices for locator URLs. Item cannot be found."

The Archive, for all their good points, are notoriously silent about these sorts of problems. A quick note that "Nobody's files are lost, and they'll reappear soon" would go a long way to making Archive users less anxious.

As it is, I'm wondering if I should hustle and look for copies of the currently-missing files on my computers, and ask friends if they've downloaded copies.

We've made a big change in the way our on-line calendar works; if all goes well, you won't notice a thing.

Please send any error reports to mike@wccatv.org.

There's a slightly different URL to add events: click here.