Plumi

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!

We’re in room 100b, come on down! If you’re remote sprinting, go to irc.freenode.net and join #plonevideosprint.

Yesterday Andrew, Limi, Nate, Vik, Barry, Thierry and Gunner sat down yesterday to do some more fleshing out of the goals and design for the sprint.

Here are some of the conclusions, please speak up if we’ve got anything wrong or if we’ve missed any key details.

As mentioned previously there are three strands

1. a new plone video suite based (mostly) on already existing tools
2. the future of plone/video – aimed to toward plone 4/5 and looking particularly at Tiles
3. essential improvements to already existing products such as Plumi and p4a

We’ve updated the feature set based on those discussions and dived into ‘must have’, ’should have’ and ‘nice to have’. (If you’re not already on the coactivate page, please join here.)

We want to granularise the tasks as much as possible to – any help people can offer there would be great.

We’re also looking to have leads on the various sections who can help break goals down into tasks and get tickets on the coactive tracker ticked off. We currently have 17 people signed up here and a few remote sprinters. We’re expecting 20-25 sprinters on board, possibly more. (Please spread the word and get people on board!)

At the moment Nate has volunteered to bottom line the video suite, and also the p4a enhancements and release.

We also discussed the idea of some of this possibly going into the core of Plone.

Vik is bottom-lining transcoding but is also keen to get more help on the coordination there. And will bottom line Plumi enhancements toward the 3.0 release.

We need a lead on the future of plone video; Limi has offered to help out in framing the needs at the start but will be attending multiple sprints. If you have any ideas or suggestions for a lead, please let us now.