"Fair use offers an extraordinarily important opportunity for educators, researchers, and others to make reasonable and limited uses of copyrighted materials. Clipping, cutting, pasting, uploading, posting, and many other activities that are common at the university may be copyright infringements or may be within fair use."

The Fair Use Checklist is quite nice.

The programs covered in this section are included in the ONE-STOP DATAMOSH KIT, which can be found at: http://www.court13.com/datamoshkit.zip

YouTube - Advanced menu options when right-clicking in the video player.

/via jeffsoo

Make subtitles, translations, and captions for almost any video. Easily caption and translate your videos, with help from your viewers.

Netflix may be known for offering some of our favorite TV and movie streams, but the company is about to step up its game and begin offering original content. Netflix has allegedly outbid a number of major cable networks for a new drama series produced by and starring Kevin Spacey called House of Cards, and may be about to close a deal at more than $100 million, according to a report on Deadline.com.

The deal has yet to be finalized, but Deadline's unnamed source claims that Netflix has made a commitment to two seasons of House of Cards, which the media site described as "staggering" and "pretty unheard of these days." A source for the New York Times later confirmed that Netflix was indeed involved in the bidding, but said there was "considerable uncertainty" about the terms of the deal. Yet another source for the Wall Street Journal said that Netflix was likely to pay much less than Deadline's speculated $100 million.






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Note-taking, av recording, and annotation tool for the Mac.

As expected, Amazon has announced its new and improved Amazon Prime service that now offers more than 5,000 streaming TV shows and movies to customers. Those who already pay the $79 per year for Prime won't have to pay any extra to get access to the streams. Video will be available on Macs and PCs in the US, as well as a number of set-top boxes.

Amazon has been rumored to be working on such a service for some time now, but the stakes were raised earlier this month when Amazon accidentally let a few movie pages show up on Prime subscribers' Amazon accounts. That was a hint that the service was on the verge of launch, and we speculated that Amazon was looking to leverage its massive built-in audience to try to take on movie streaming giant Netflix.






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If you want to read the most cogent piece of urban writing we are likely to see in the English language in 2011, just read "The Wire" creator David Simon's response to a comment by the current Baltimore Police Chief Frederick H. Bealefeld III that his show and its depiction of Baltimore were a "smear on this city that will take decades to overcome." Simon's letter is unflinching, direct, brutally efficient and unrelenting in arguing that he was calling it like he saw it, and that it was the police department and the political establishment which must take responsibility for a long history of obfuscation and false representation when it comes to crime and decay in Baltimore.This debate about Baltimore, its image, and the role of both leaders and writers in producing and promoting that image is one that hits home for many cities around he world. I have had a bit of a lucky streak of late, as life, love and weddings have spirited me away to some of the most interesting and infamous cities on this side of the Urals - Beirut, Detroit, New Orleans. Dynamic cities all, rich in history, culture, immigrants, gastronomic delights, street art, architectural marvels, grassroots politics, complexities, miseries and quandaries. Yet try as we might, it is often hard to see through the blunt symbolism that disaster has foisted upon all three - add in Baghdad and perhaps now Juarez and you have a Mt. Rushmore of cities whose names evoke an image of crisis.Beirut, for all of its urban dynamism, obscene property values and downtown redevelopment, still conjures up images of the civil war and the Green Line, even if the space of the Green Line is now the heart of upscale, gulf-oil-money driven redevelopment and it' name part of a new branding campaign. Our image of Beirut as urban war zone - aided by the current troubles and the 2006 bombings by Israel - also serve to mask the intense poverty of the former Palestinian refugee camps like Sabra and Shatilla, which are now classic informal settlements woven into the dense urban fabric of the southern suburbs, or the more mundane issues of traffic, lack of public space and an almost non-existent public transit program. Beirut as war zone masks the reality of the fact that the poor in Lebanon, as my Beiruti friend Hanna says, "are fucked."It is a similar story in Detroit and New Orleans. Detroit suffers from being both symbol of despair and symbol of hope, torn between overly rosy dreams and overly bleak depictions of horror, missing the mundane stories of black middle class families, Bangladeshi shopkeepers or mildly successful redevelopment. In New Orleans, Katrina can mask the inequities that produced Katrina - "rebuilding" forgets that it was the dramatic inequalities and brutal contradictions that made the city so vulnerable to a "natural disaster" in the first place.If we can see past the city as symbol, we will notice those little moments which show the paradoxes which make cities real. On a warm fall day in November, I was in Treme, the New Orleans neighborhood famed for its music and the subject of Simon's current urban portraiture. While walking in a jazz funeral for local legend Walter Payton Jr., a classic and beautifully New Orleans celebration of a live well lived, we passed by a church, limousines parked quietly out front, where another funeral was being held, in this case for a young black man killed by gun violence the week before.This moment in Treme also makes you realize the true mistake that the Chief made when describing Simon - "The Wire" is so popular and such a brilliant pedagogical tour because it is not all sturm und drang or rosy imagery, it does not treat Baltimore as a symbol but rather captures the bitter and the sweet and the bittersweet in 66 hours of brilliance. Other cities should be so lucky. Credits: Images of Detroit, Beirut and New Orleans by Alex Schafran. Video of Walter Payton's jazz funeral by aigesscott from the Youtube.

The article is called Depth of field: discursive design research through film written by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen. It is about the role of film in interaction and product design research, and the use of film in exploring and explaining emerging technologies.

The iPhone 4 just begs for some good video content to be played on its high-resolution display—which, contrary to popular belief, isn't made of retinas. The easiest way to get video is through Apple's iTunes Store, but there are many reasons why you might want to watch videos that you already have lying around instead. If you're lucky, your video is already in a format that the iPhone supports. In that case, just add the file to iTunes and sync. But what if it's not in the right format?
The iPhone 4, the iPad, and the latest versions of the iPod touch all support H.264 main profile level 3.1. What that means is that you can play HD video with a resolution of up to 1280x720 and a framerate of 30 frames per second. That's a significant step up from the baseline profile level 3.0 (720x480x30 or 720x576x25) that the older iPhones and iPod touches support, and even an improvement over the older Apple TV, which could only play 1280x720 video at 24 frames per second or less. The main profile rather than baseline profile means that it's possible to use more effective compression.

So how to go about creating those H.264 files?







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The Most Pixels Ever is an open-source Java framework for spanning Processing sketches across multiple screens. We are also developing a C++ client for use with openFrameWorks.

A comparison of HTML5 players.

Cycles is a surreal animation made by Cyriak. I had me definitely entertained for 2 minutes and 59 seconds. Watch it!

found at rebel:art

So the Old Spice campaign was funny, surprising, and perfectly-calibrated. These would be reasons enough to like it. But I’m not going to let you stop there. Here’s how I think the campaign establishes an important new precedent—not for online advertising, but for online storytelling across the board.

Here’s where I think it could take us.

Start here: as it became apparent that this wasn’t just a one-time media drop, but instead an ongoing live performance—a spectacle in progress—I was reminded of something that I heard Rex Sorgatz say years ago. I’ll paraphrase, broadly: blogs are actually more related to live theater than they are to, say, newspapers. The things that make a blog good are almost exactly the things that make a live performance good—and the most important, the magic catalyst, is the interplay with the audience.

So extend that beyond blogs, to Twitter feeds and Kickstarter projects and ARGs and whatever it is that Old Spice just did. I really believe in the analogy.

You know what else this campaign made me think of? 48 Hour Magazine. There was that same sense of you-gotta-see-this, and then that same sense of can-they-really-do-it. It was an event—and you know how I feel about those.

I actually think most of the ideas in my events manifesto apply here, but let me highlight one in particular:

But [an event’s] urgency—its live­ness, human vital­ity, and, frankly, its risk and unpredictability—is what makes it more than just another link in the stream.

It’s media as high-wire act. It’s immediacy—which is not coincidentally one of the eight things that are better than free.

If you’re a creative person interested in crafting worlds and telling stories and you are not chewing hard on this campaign, then you’ve missed the point (and quite possibly the whole zeitgeist). I actually think it’s a fluke that the substance of this stunt happened to be commercial. Is it so hard to imagine it another way? Let’s try:

The Old Spice videos weren’t one-liners. They actually pretty quickly established running themes and in-jokes. Taken all together, they mapped out a coherent world—a very small, weird world, populated by one man and one towel, but still: a world.

Now imagine for a moment that this hadn’t been the brain-child of some smart ad guys. Imagine instead that it was the opus of some young Lucas.

Imagine that all the parameters were the same: One actor. One scene. Simple, rich cinematography. Live production stretched over a couple of days. Lots of audience interaction. But the story he’s telling—the world he’s creating—is much more interesting. Maybe the scene is the cockpit of a spaceship; maybe it’s a cramped room in an interstellar hotel.

What would the Old Spice campaign look like if it was directed by a new Joss Whedon, just starting out?

Maybe I’m stretching this way too far; maybe it only works when it’s silly. But I don’t think so. I actually think you could get a lot more serious and a lot more sophisticated (although I’ll admit it would be harder to pull off). There are ways to interact with an audience that aren’t just jokey call-and-response.

Now, I don’t want to underplay the talent involved here; a room full of geniuses from Wieden+Kennedy made this media machine go. But this is where this new model—the live event, the ephemeral spectacle—saves us. Because to fund a room full of geniuses for a year, you need a business. But to fund a room full of geniuses for a day? All you need is a little chutzpah.

I think it’s awesome that Wieden+Kennedy did this first, though. I’d much rather work back from this campaign than work forward from some not-very-engaging piece of net performance art. (Which, of course, might already have been done. Who knows? Exactly.)

There’s more to say about why this was great—the fact that it produced a wide net of content, for instance, instead of a single video or a single live-stream. But you get the point. So I’ll leave you with one final reason to take this format seriously:

It’s fun to do. It’s tons of fun. Anybody who’s written a blog, or gotten deep into Twitter, or run a Kickstarter project, or pulled the strings on an ARG will tell you that there is a special joy to receiving real-time feedback on your work. There’s a special satisfaction to seeing its impact on the world immediately—and adjusting based on what you see. It’s alive, it’s electric, it’s addictive. It’s connected and communal.

The live theater folks had this figured out—their stages were just too small. Now we’ve got one that’s a lot bigger, and more flexible, too. So the question becomes: what’s on the playbill?

Netflix continues to inch its way up the movie distribution hierarchy and will soon be able to stream some new releases during the so-called "pay TV window." The company struck a deal with Relativity Media, a distribution house responsible for some major Hollywood films, that will give Netflix users access to streamed movies years faster in some cases.

As many Netflix users are painfully aware, the Watch Instantly pool is typically made up of a random selection of old 'n' busted films (and usually not even the good ones), with the occasional surprise movie that was released sometime after the year 2000. The reason for this is because most distribution houses give priority to their DVD release window, at which time, no one can play the movie until the studios feel they have milked every last drop of DVD revenue.





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A reader sent this video called Sonar to me yesterday and it definitely caught my eye. Made just with flash, the video seems to me like a graphic visualization of music, like if we needed to describe music with images instead of sound. It’s amazing how complex the video gets at the end, I love how the shapes start to align and pop, it’s such a rad effect. I could almost see something like this being a video game, though I’m not exactly sure how it would work.

Bobby

OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming functions for real time computer vision.

Tokyo/Glow from Nathan Johnston on Vimeo.

The longer I watch this video, the more I wonder how it was created... blue screen maybe? Its a beautiful mystery.

[Shoutout to Madeline for the tip!]

ASCIImeo (asciimeo.com) is a project by Peter Nitsch that renders Vimeo videos in three different textmodes.

Here are some of Peter’s favorite videos in ASCII:
Metamorphosis by Glenn Marshall
MOTOR / AMBIENT REEL by KU-SCHNEIDER
Magnetic Ink by flight404
Still Run by DANTE NOU
Look At Me by Patrick Lawler

Read more incl technical info on Peter’s blog. Video below is of Glenn Marshall’s generative app also available for the iPhone.

(via today and tomorrow incl images = ASCIImeo version of Scintillation)

ASCII Animation (Scripts)WriteRoom Now with WebApp Sync [iPhone, WebApp]Chrome Experiments [News]12seconds [WebApp]A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter [Objects]AsciiMe [iPhone]

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation.

The trick I used to get my Lenovo T60 with Intel video working with a dual display.

A series of excellent presentations held by Douglas Crockford from Yahoo!

The movie Airplane! is an almost scene by scene remake of the 1957 movie Zero Hour. These videos compare the two films.

In this presentation, which is meant to be the beginning of the three-course sequence (followed by “Theory of the DOM” and then “Advanced JavaScript”), Douglas explores not only the language as it is today but also how the language came to be the

Today we'll learn how to download a film, transcode it ready for DVD, create the file structure of a DVD, make a DVD ISO and burn the damn thing.

A helpful list of blank media quality. CD-RW, DVD-R, etc.

a cover of Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps"

This is the official homepage of Url Snooper, a program written to help users locate the urls of audio and video files so that they can be recorded.

more iTunes looting, this time grab some videos