Hello, You might be interested to learn about a new project that has just been launched by TheyWorkForYou.com - an online video archive of the House of Commons, with video clips posted in Flash video format alongside the text of speeches from Hansard. You can view them on the website, or you can embed clips of the individual speeches on your blog or personal website by copying and pasting a bit of HTML that is listed below each clip on theyworkforyou.com. See the blog posting at http://www.mysociety.org/2008/06/01/video-recordings-of-the-house-of-commons-on-theyworkforyoucom/ for the full announcement.
The key thing now is that we need your help to match up ~28,000 speeches with the video footage (we've already got about 4,300 done). We've built a really simple, hyper-addictive website for people to use, complete with league tables and prizes (the rare and coveted mySociety hoodies). You can find it right now at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/video/ - if you want to appear on the league table then take 30 seconds and register a username. It's crowd sourcing applied to video timestamping - using our simple and remarkably addictive online game (with league tables, and did I mention the prizes?). Matching up individual speeches to video cuepoints is actually done in two stages - firstly, the CaptionerBot makes an approximate match for some of the speeches in Hansard using the raw BBC captions, and then we ask the general public to improve on the work of CaptionerBot using our simple and addictive online game (league table, prizes, etc). The video is taken from BBC Parliament, chopped up and transcoded into Flash video format (generic Flash 6, iirc), and served up to the general public using lighttpd and mod_flv_streaming. This lets us give you direct access to any point in the video file just by specifying a parameter in the URL that indicates seconds elapsed since the start of the file. The backend processing system uses lots of open source software to download and process live footage of the House of Commons from BBC Parliament (ffmpeg, mplayer, mencoder, yamdi, and quite a lot of perl), and the BBC web api to get the schedule information it needs to extract the live coverage. Now, please help us out by timestamping some video! http://www.theyworkforyou.com/video/ is the place to be... All the best, Etienne -- Etienne Pollard [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 (0) 7946 415 996 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
