cspan

[Thomas Lord]

Peter and Richard (and openly to the "opengov" and
"openhouseproject" mailing lists -- be careful
with "reply-all"):

I noticed that you guys got the public
radio station in your area to use free
formats in a refreshingly diplomatic
and effective political action.

Today I went to CSPAN on the internet
hoping to stream some content, since I don't
buy cable TV. Of course, I could not
because they offer formats that are not
free.

Please fix them, next :-)

-t

[kirk mullis]

I'm not sure what you mean by the content not being in a "free format".  It does not cost any money to view video on cspan.  all you need is widows media player of real player both of which are freed video players.

--
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace
-Sri Chinmoy Ghose

kirkmullis.com
infoagerevolution.blogspot.com/

[Joshua Gay]

In the context of software or formats, the notion of "free format," generally refers to the licensing, i.e., free vs. proprietary. Windows Media Format and MP3 are both proprietary formats, meaning that you are not legally allowed to create software to encode/decode to/from them without paying a hefty licensing fee and often singing a restrictive license with the vendor. This means most users are forced to go through one vendor or another. Being forced to use Windows Media Player is no small burden. Microsoft a company twice convicted of unfair business practices has been found to create malware and to put backdoors in their software. Microsoft aside, in the very least, it is unecessary to create corporate gate keepers between the public and government data. Choosing free file formats such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora allow you to have high-quality, highly-compressed media that anybody can encode and decode to and from. Ogg is supported on all major operating systems and by dozens of media players. You can read a good post called Why Ogg Matters, with regard to why Firefox has native Ogg support but not other file types, here, http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/why_ogg_matters.html or I encourage you to visit http://playogg.org to find out more about free media formats.

Lastly, the Metavid project has been providing Ogg Theora support for quite some time. See their post, http://metavid.org/blog/2007/02/03/ogg-theora-in-your-webpage/

-Josh

--
<http://joshuagay.org>

[ni.p...@gmail.com]

Hi Kirk and Thomas,
We've been working closely with CSPAN and they offer an FTP service
for their videos to us. We license the videos at a pretty reasonable
cost. CSPAN understands that there are many of us who want CSPAN
content and want in in an easily digestible format and legally use
it. If you want more details, please email me.

Perla
Voterwatch
p...@voterwatch.org

On Dec 8, 10:15 am, "Joshua Gay" <joshua...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In the context of software or formats, the notion of "free format,"
> generally refers to the licensing, i.e., free vs. proprietary. Windows Media
> Format and MP3 are both proprietary formats, meaning that you are not
> legally allowed to create software to encode/decode to/from them without
> paying a hefty licensing fee and often singing a restrictive license with
> the vendor. This means most users are forced to go through one vendor or
> another. Being forced to use Windows Media Player is no small burden.
> Microsoft a company twice convicted of unfair business practices has been
> found to create malware and to put backdoors in their software. Microsoft
> aside, in the very least, it is unecessary to create corporate gate keepers
> between the public and government data. Choosing free file formats such as
> Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora allow you to have high-quality, highly-compressed
> media that anybody can encode and decode to and from. Ogg is supported on
> all major operating systems and by dozens of media players. You can read a
> good post called Why Ogg Matters, with regard to why Firefox has native Ogg
> support but not other file types, here,http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/why_ogg_matters.htmlor

> I encourage you to visithttp://playogg.orgto find out more about free

> media formats.
>
> Lastly, the Metavid project has been providing Ogg Theora support for quite

> some time. See their post,http://metavid.org/blog/2007/02/03/ogg-theora-in-your-webpage/

>
> -Josh
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 9:46 AM, kirk mullis <kool...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you mean by the content not being in a "free format".  It
> > does not cost any money to view video on cspan.  all you need is widows
> > media player of real player both of which are freed video players.
>

[kirk mullis]

Ahh... So your talking about open source.  I agree with you there.  I am a big supporter of open source software and file formats.  I believe the videos are actually in mp4 which is an mpeg media file format which I believe is an open source file format although i'm not 100 percent sure of that.  At least I know that any digital media player you use will play mpeg file formats.  It seems to me that ogg is just another digital media compressor like mpeg and in fact I think RealPlayer supports Ogg file formats.  But I agree 100% that we need to support open source software and i even think open source technology with creative commons licensing should be the way to go.  I've thought a few times aobut converting to a Linux OS but I do 3D computer graphics and some of the software that i use does not have a Linux version.  Thanks for the info about Ogg.  I'll defenitely look into it more.

Kirk

[Thomas Lord]

On Mon, 2008-12-08 at 09:46 -0500, kirk mullis wrote:
> I'm not sure what you mean by the content not being in a "free
> format". It does not cost any money to view video on cspan. all you
> need is widows media player of real player both of which are freed
> video players.

Free as in "freedom".

I can not use real player or windows media player
unless I want to give up some of my freedom to
the vendors of those systems.

To view the proceedings of the house on-line should
not require me to agree to a restrictive EULA
with those firms or to use software that I am not
free to run as I see fit, examine, share, and
modify and share my modifications.

-t