Where have all my music videos gone?
by Bascha Harris
We might be a bit busy these days, but we’re still keeping one eyeball on the tech topics that fascinate.
YouTube and MySpace are finally hitting the brick wall that everyone warned them about–the proliferation of copyrighted stuff on their services. So what now? I don’t know about you, but I’ve already gone looking for several pieces, only to find them missing. Most notable? Some acoustic covers I’d been using to try and emulate my favorite rock gods… whose music I already own. Frustrating.
And timely. News has it that Viacom has brought the lawsuit. It will be interesting–and important–to see how this plays out.
And even even more revolting copyfight news, web radio took a heavy shot to the head recently. The new per-play fees to be levied by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) (at the recommendation of the RIAA, of course) will, in some cases, constitute more than 100% of the actual revenues generated by the web radio casts in question. Does this mean that web radio–save for channels that are backed by big spenders–is a thing of the past?
And it’s not just music files they’re paying attention to. All UR img, they belong to us.
New use #232785043 for the internet: using MySpace to profile (and hopefully catch) a bank robber..
And for those who need a bigger bite, get serious and hunker down with Doc Searl’s blog post on relationship economies. At least we know that Searl’s content is copyright and infringement free.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:01 am
ooooh how about a whole set of articles about how one can use open-source software on Red Hat/Fedora to create Create Commons/OPL movies about how to use computers or other things.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Good comment, Stephen. Here’s a starting point to mull over.
I use Fedora Core5. I loaded it with CCRMA’s bundled package:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
Then, I installed mencoder, mplayer, cinelerra, Audacity.
This setup allows me to take photos, move them into a directory. I then bring up a terminal and type:
$> mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=320:h=240:fps=1/7:type=jpg -ovc copy -audiofile whatever_audio_file.ogg -oac pcm -o test1.avi
This produces the test1.avi video. I immediately type:
$> mencoder test1.avi -o new5.mpg -ofps 25 -vf scale=320:240,harddup -of mpeg -mpegopts format=vcd -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=224 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vrc_buf_size=327:keyint=15:vrc_maxrate=1152:vbitrate=1152:vmax_b_frames=0
I now have the new5.mpg video. This loads into Cinelerra for editing, where effects, video clips, etc. can be integrated, and a final movie exported in a number of formats can be completed.
It’s fairly klutzy, but makes for fun projects. The audio file is easily created, using Audacity, where one can record into a microphone, add music samples, files, etc. Great for podcasting enthusiasts.
Best of all, the above describes a community-based recording studio that costs zero dollars out-of-pocket, beyond a cheap microphone. Just go to your nearest university recycle store, and ask for a donated cheap desktop computer. When you’re done playing with it, take it to your favorite local nonprofit, church, senior citizen center, whatever, and pat yourself on the back! :)
March 29th, 2007 at 10:28 am
I like this article idea(s).
April 4th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Head of to getdemocracy.com - a fair number of bugs still, but the idea is great: you use that to store all your video content on your machine locally rather than relying on the site you got it from to keep it there…