Plumi

From April 15-17 EngageMedia will be hosting a Plone based Video Archive Camp in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in collaboration with the Indonesian Visual Art Archive.

The three day camp will continue EngageMedia’s work of setting up 4 Plumi based offline video archives with a series of arts/activist partners based in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. [Read background blog post]

We have space at the camp for 2 additional volunteer Ploneistas. A key focus of the camp will be upgrading the four archives to Plumi 3.0, as well as running various workshops with local technologists to enhance their ability to customise of the platform. You’ll be working with EngageMedia and the crew from Unweb as regards the workshops. A more detailed breakdown of the event can be found in this pdf.

We can cover all food and accommodation in the lovely surrounds of central Java during the event if you are able to pay your way to Indonesia. If you are interested in attending please contact Andrew at and@engagemedia.org by March 15th.

Albany Senior High School in New Zealand is using Plumi for delivery of video-based teaching and learning resources. The site was set up by a group of students who were undertaking a project to ‘give something back’ to the school. Teachers and students use Plumi to share documentaries, animations and other videos, and the site is accessible from anywhere in the world, meaning students can log in and view video-based homework at any time, from any place.

Albany Senior High School is currently in discussions with other schools and will probably expand access to the site into other schools.

Plumi 3.0 Beta2 is a fully functional release of Plumi built on Plone 3.3.4. Plumi is a free software video sharing platform. Plumi 3.0 Beta2 enables all the features previously available with Plumi 0.2.3 and includes some additional enhancements and bug fixes listed below. A 3.0-Final release will follow in the coming weeks.

The release can be downloaded at http://plone.org/products/plumi/releases/3.0-Beta2 or you can access the release via svn here. We’d love to have people testing the beta2 to assist with the progression through a Release Candidate version and on to the final production release. If you find any issues in testing please report them via the Plumi Trac.

A development version of the beta2 can be viewed at http://latest-v.plumi.org

Plumi 3.0 Beta2 includes the following fixes and feature additions

• upgraded to latest plone stable release 3.3.4
• auto-creation of thumbnail image from uploaded video
• large file uploads – integrated FTP support (previously available but not packaged with 0.2.3)
• Built in blob support to improve large file handling
• New, more stable and configurable transcoding framework (Transcode Daemon)
• html5 support
• Social networking – ability to find people based on their location or their interest in genres, activities & media formats
• Indonesian translation of Plumi and Plone interface
• Built in content translation via linguaplone
• Increased flash player size and quality
• Ability to add related items, location information and language when publishing a video
• Updated flowplayer
• Auto-notifications on retraction or rejection of content
• New cleaner design
• Fixed the content licensing UI error
• Date of release can start from 1960
• All countries are now included in taxonomy by default
• Ajaxification of commenting including profile thumbnails associated with comments

These features are in addition to the out of box new features in Plone 3.0 such as:

• content ratings
• dashboard to list your content and add rss feeds
• Inline editing
• easier collaboration and sharing of content with other site members

Plumi 3 Beta2 release has been made possible thanks to the work of EngageMedia, unweb.me, Mahiti, Andy Nicholson and Victor Rajewski.

A new Plumi 3 buildout based on Plone 3.3.2 has just been released. We’ve also moved the buildout to the Plone Collective to make sure it’s easy for people to join and contribute to the project.

The new build out can be found here:
https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/plumi.buildout/trunk/
A description of how to use is at:
http://plumi.org/wiki/HowToInstallPlumiUsingTheBuildout#Plumi3

EngageMedia and Kunci Cultural Studies Center are pleased to announce the launch of Videochronic. This publication is the result of a collaborative research project charting how activists are engaging with video technologies in Indonesia, addressing some of the issues of technology-mediated social movements, and exploring the potential and limitations of online video distribution.

The past decade in Indonesia has seen a dramatic increase in the use of video as a social change tool by community, campaign and activist organisations. Access to the tools for producing and distributing video have become increasingly democratised over this period.

But how are video activists taking to using new video distribution technologies? Beyond the hype how are these tools being used on the ground? This research explores how social change video work is currently being distributed in Indonesia, from VCD to vodcasting, Creative Commons to Copyright, and considers how are activists might approach distribution in the future.

This 140 page book presents both English and Indonesian versions of the research as well as colour illustrations including a visualisation of the development of video activism and online video.

The research can be downloaded as PDF or hard copies may be ordered.

Full details at: http://engagemedia.org/videochronic

The Plone Video sprint wrapped up last Tuesday after four very intensive and productive days. We got a tonne done.

• We began a new plone video suite that brings together the base common features most users expect, such as embedded flash, ogg and h264 video, vodcasting, transcoding, large file handling, content licensing support, metadata extraction and much more.
• a huge amount of work was done on transcoding in particular by EngageMedia and Unweb built on top of Convert Daemon
• upgrading of the Plumi buildout to the latest stable Plone release, 3.3.1
• Translation of Plumi and Plone into Indonesian is almost complete
• We built a solid basis for ongoing collaboration, more video sprints coming hopefully!!

To continue the momentum for the Plone video suite we’ve started a new project on launchpad. Please sign up if you are interested in contributing.

You can also find us in irc.freenode.net #plonevideo.

We’ve had a busy couple of days of coding. Among the things we got to:

• Working Plumi buildout for Plone3.3
• Indonesian translation for Plumi
• Work on transcoding – splitting convertdaemon from the ATReal richfile framework
• Solid progress ‘plone video suite’
• Work on transcoding – splitting convertdaemon from the ATReal richfile framework
• html 5 video tag support for ogg and h.264

Remember if you’re attending the Plone Sprint – we offer food for code! And we have coffee!