The Who, The What, and The Why
My name is Daniell Krawczyk and I work at LTC, a Community Media and Technology center in Lowell, Massachusetts.
DigitalBicycle came directly out of my own needs trying to participate in a collaborative youth media project with other public access centers. While every center was shooting and editing digitally, we were distributing our content in as analog of a way possible, the U.S. Postal Service. The collaborations biggest problem was that getting your hands on media from other centers took time and energy, putting your media into the hands of your partners took time, energy, and money (tape stock, envelopes, and postage), and curating the media took even more time and energy (logging, digitizing, and mastering new tapes). The collaborative was limited by the amount of time, energy, and money people could put towards participating and while it might have been just barely feasible to mail a box of VHS tapes to 8 places every month, if you increase the number of partners it gets harder and harder to sustain.
At the same time that this was happening, I was finding out just how many television series were being traded on the internet by p2p systems. Places like the the Digital Archive Project (http://www.dapcentral.org/) have been making high-quality versions of shows that have not been commercially released available for free download, and file trading communities often have episodes of current series only hours after they are broadcast (sometimes even before they are broadcast). This just seemed so ridiculous to me, that I could get my hands on a near-DVD quality, digital version of a commercial television show without any cost and little energy and time. If, on the other hand, I want to get a copy of a 15 minute youth-produced documentary on adults perceptions of teens, something that the creator wants me to have, I have no easy way to get it.
Luckily, we're not the first community to run into this problem and make this transition. Live music tape-traders, for the most part, no longer trade tape. They now use communities like Sharing the Groove (http:/www.sharingthegroove.org/) and EasyTree (http://bt.easytree.org/) as well the Live Music Archive (http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php).
Also part of archive.org is the Prelinger Archive (http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php), a large collection of educational, industrial, and ephemeral films that are now in the public-domain and can be easily downloaded, dumped into a non-linear editing program, and edited into a new piece (or simply programmed into a "showcase").
It was in the vein of these projects (as well as the excellent Public Radio Exchange (http://www.prx.org) that we felt a new community could be developed, where cablecast quality video files could be browsed and downloaded and easily assembled into showcase pieces, where a producer who has previously been "bicycling" his tapes to sponsors and centers around the country and whose reach is limited by the time and cost of making and mailing tapes could make his show available hours after editing, and where someone like me, who hates making trips to the post office, can trade locally produced television programs as easily as I now trade concert recordings and childhood cartoons.
This post has gone on way too long, so I'll try to be as brief as possible in this last paragraph. This isn't a product, this isn't a service, this is an idea, a community and a collaborative, following in the open source software development model. In the interest of getting things started, we have laid some ground rules of what we're looking at building this system with. The project will be cross-platform, it'll use open-source software as much as possible, and it will have a centralized database, but use decentralized storage and bandwidth so as to be sustainable as possible. Much like the other communities sharing large files in an organized manner, we'll be using BitTorrent (http://www.bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/) which will allow any center to host their own files and download other files using only an average computer and a broadband internet connection. The files will be encoded in a way that makes it easy for them to be dropped directly into a non-linear editor (NLE) or right into a DVD authoring program using an open-source video codec (possibly XVID, possibly Ogg Theora and will be full-frame (29.97) and full size (720 by 480) files and describle as "near-DVD" quality without going over 700 MB per hour-long program. We will also strive for simple automation of the encoding and seeding (BitTorrent lingo for making a file available) of a file and on the other end of the pipeline, automatic downloading of videos from trusted partners, possibly using RSS (see "broadcatching" http://scottraymond.net/archive/4745 and http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004274.html). Finally, because with BitTorrent being a good member of the community relies on giving as much as you get (which only costs the user bandwidth and CPU cycles), the system will track the "share ratio" of the members and encourage community friendly behavior.
Well, this was more of a manifesto than I intended and I could still go on and on, but for now I'll end this saying that we do have a proof of concept running as part of the Commonwealth Broadband Collaborative ( http://sandbox.cpcs.umb.edu/ezt/ ) and if you'd like to try to download a video with it, might I suggest "Chi" a short and peaceful piece of video mixing, or "Write You A Song" which was made using footage from the Prelinger Archive. Of course, if you haven't used BitTorrent before you're going to need a bit more instruction but that'll come in a future post....
DigitalBicycle came directly out of my own needs trying to participate in a collaborative youth media project with other public access centers. While every center was shooting and editing digitally, we were distributing our content in as analog of a way possible, the U.S. Postal Service. The collaborations biggest problem was that getting your hands on media from other centers took time and energy, putting your media into the hands of your partners took time, energy, and money (tape stock, envelopes, and postage), and curating the media took even more time and energy (logging, digitizing, and mastering new tapes). The collaborative was limited by the amount of time, energy, and money people could put towards participating and while it might have been just barely feasible to mail a box of VHS tapes to 8 places every month, if you increase the number of partners it gets harder and harder to sustain.
At the same time that this was happening, I was finding out just how many television series were being traded on the internet by p2p systems. Places like the the Digital Archive Project (http://www.dapcentral.org/) have been making high-quality versions of shows that have not been commercially released available for free download, and file trading communities often have episodes of current series only hours after they are broadcast (sometimes even before they are broadcast). This just seemed so ridiculous to me, that I could get my hands on a near-DVD quality, digital version of a commercial television show without any cost and little energy and time. If, on the other hand, I want to get a copy of a 15 minute youth-produced documentary on adults perceptions of teens, something that the creator wants me to have, I have no easy way to get it.
Luckily, we're not the first community to run into this problem and make this transition. Live music tape-traders, for the most part, no longer trade tape. They now use communities like Sharing the Groove (http:/www.sharingthegroove.org/) and EasyTree (http://bt.easytree.org/) as well the Live Music Archive (http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php).
Also part of archive.org is the Prelinger Archive (http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php), a large collection of educational, industrial, and ephemeral films that are now in the public-domain and can be easily downloaded, dumped into a non-linear editing program, and edited into a new piece (or simply programmed into a "showcase").
It was in the vein of these projects (as well as the excellent Public Radio Exchange (http://www.prx.org) that we felt a new community could be developed, where cablecast quality video files could be browsed and downloaded and easily assembled into showcase pieces, where a producer who has previously been "bicycling" his tapes to sponsors and centers around the country and whose reach is limited by the time and cost of making and mailing tapes could make his show available hours after editing, and where someone like me, who hates making trips to the post office, can trade locally produced television programs as easily as I now trade concert recordings and childhood cartoons.
This post has gone on way too long, so I'll try to be as brief as possible in this last paragraph. This isn't a product, this isn't a service, this is an idea, a community and a collaborative, following in the open source software development model. In the interest of getting things started, we have laid some ground rules of what we're looking at building this system with. The project will be cross-platform, it'll use open-source software as much as possible, and it will have a centralized database, but use decentralized storage and bandwidth so as to be sustainable as possible. Much like the other communities sharing large files in an organized manner, we'll be using BitTorrent (http://www.bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/) which will allow any center to host their own files and download other files using only an average computer and a broadband internet connection. The files will be encoded in a way that makes it easy for them to be dropped directly into a non-linear editor (NLE) or right into a DVD authoring program using an open-source video codec (possibly XVID, possibly Ogg Theora and will be full-frame (29.97) and full size (720 by 480) files and describle as "near-DVD" quality without going over 700 MB per hour-long program. We will also strive for simple automation of the encoding and seeding (BitTorrent lingo for making a file available) of a file and on the other end of the pipeline, automatic downloading of videos from trusted partners, possibly using RSS (see "broadcatching" http://scottraymond.net/archive/4745 and http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004274.html). Finally, because with BitTorrent being a good member of the community relies on giving as much as you get (which only costs the user bandwidth and CPU cycles), the system will track the "share ratio" of the members and encourage community friendly behavior.
Well, this was more of a manifesto than I intended and I could still go on and on, but for now I'll end this saying that we do have a proof of concept running as part of the Commonwealth Broadband Collaborative ( http://sandbox.cpcs.umb.edu/ezt/ ) and if you'd like to try to download a video with it, might I suggest "Chi" a short and peaceful piece of video mixing, or "Write You A Song" which was made using footage from the Prelinger Archive. Of course, if you haven't used BitTorrent before you're going to need a bit more instruction but that'll come in a future post....
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