Source Sauce

So there are only so many hours in a day, people can’t spend all their time watching Youtube. Some day they will need something that isn’t so closed. I recently closed my youtube account, yes i was one of those jerks with a video of their friends being defamed on the internet. I had a video of a friend being kicked in the balls. let me put this incontext. I first found youtube and found it a bastion of hilarity and weird stuff. I posted a video of a friend dressed as Megaman, a semi-popular old school game character. Well it got some hits, we laughed. Then another friend wanted to challenge my friend to hit count war. So i uploaded a video of him being nailed in the junk.

Well before I knew it that video had 15,000 hits, the megaman cosplay had maybe 900. Anyway it had been awhile since i check on it when i got an email from Youtube saying that the ball kick had been removed for content. Unsure of why this happened, the email didn’t explain much, and there was no way for me to contest the discision, I was attacked by the man and so in response I took down my entire catalogue.

This is just the set up. This made me realize why the opensource movement is so important. Not for the monetary reason but the community aspect. Youtube has developed a false sense of many a thing. First is its fake sense of community. Sure you can video battle your nemisis from the east coast in a tap dance contest, but where do you turn when youtube takes down the video. Wanna complain to the makers, eh they care… they just made a cool billion off their community selling your videos to google.

What do you do when they use your video on a commercial, promotion. Take it. Promblems are furthered when you think of youtube as the prime example of web 2.0… wait its not… its just a poser, the avril lavigne of web 2.0. Go to youtube right now and try to download your own video…. can’t do it… didn’t think so… go post your youtube video on a friends myspace.. … like the bulging youtube ad you’ve just grown in your pants? Sure its integrated to a point, but these walls that are created have too much of the staunchness of web 1.0. Islands in a sea of creativity, huge money exchanges and the consumer will loose.

So where to turn, of course there are options out there for opensource distribution but there really needs to be a place to dump all this stuff like youtube, but without the walls. Someplace that embraces it’s community and gives them a voice. Without their community youtube would never be worth the price google paid for it. It’s a real shame the creators didn’t realize this.

I told my story only to show that I may be biased, but i hope that I have made some valid points that I was already becoming concerned with and then the sale occurred right after my complaint and it all seemed to pile up.

..haha overly used joke

It seems at the moment that viral video sites such as youtube and google video are all the rage. However with these sites and their methods comes a great amount of control on their part. They rescrict the length, content, and most importantly quality of all videos shown on their site. These sites take every uploaded video and compress them into their own flash based player rendering most videos near unwatchable.

Now granted they have perfectly good reasons, limited server space, copyright reasons the list goes on, but it still comes down to having to either edit the content to fit into their world or create content specifically for these types of sites. Not a good compromise for those that want full control over their end product. Enter Open Source to offer some interesting alternatives.
So where is the serious video creator to go if he/she intends to have the final say in how
the final product looks and is presented? One option out right now is the completely open source Democracy Player.

Democracy player, DP, combines two other open source programs to allow users to distribute their videos to their audience, without having to host the entire file on their server. By mixing RSS feeds and Bit Torrent downloading DP allows users to create their own channel of sorts and let viewers download the file via Bit torrent. This is the simplified explanation but it gets the point across that basically video creators can have more control over what the end video looks like and what the audio sounds like, allowing them to choose a middle ground between quality and speed of download.

The user interface for DP is very user friendly, and looks much like a video on demand setup, viewers can choice what files to download, how long to keep the files ect. It also allows content publisher to create their own channel’s look and feel, and each RSS can have thumbnails and other extras to give viewers a glimpse into their program.

Democracy Player is far from being able to replace the easy to use and highly rigid viral video site however it is a great alternative for those looking for more self control. Given that Democracy player is open source it should be interesting to see what could spawn off of this initial program, or what sorts of add-on could be created in the future.

Pros:

uses well established open source codes to deliver self published content. RSS and Bit torrent are both extremely popular and for good reasons.
The front end has some really nice features, bookmarking of channels, time setting for keeping files, resembles video on demand programs.

 Cons:

Back end can be hard for new comers, takes time and knowledge.

Bit Torrent requires a server set up for bit torrent and that one seed always be on.

Still in early stage of dev, has some bugs and glitches to be worked out.

Audience is not nearly as big as viral video sites.
For more about Democracy player visit http://www.getdemocracy.com/