Generally a great idea. But why on earth is this being done this way?
The Astons on the channel carry the information anyway, and we know that this can be fed into another computer system, as the MHEG5 version of BBC Parliament. I can't be that hard for BBC Parliament to provide the feed of information that is used to generate the Astons (and the former MHEG5 service) as a live text file (or something). 2008/6/3 Etienne Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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/ > -- Please email me back if you need any more help. Brian Butterworth http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and switchover advice, since 2002
