Local VideosIf you are in a hurry: this is about a quick way to organize the thousands of recent videos about manifestations, occupations, forced evictions and police brutality in indexes like this: Primeiras manifestações ======================= (YT) Material Bruto Sem Cortes RIO ALERJ (YT) Zerovinte (YT) "Aqui vocês não são Advogados"[] [] [] Note that some of the links point to local copies of the videos - which can be accessed very quickly and without the need of an internet connection when all things are copied to an HD or pen drive. IntroductionMost of our acquaintances and relatives are still getting their news almost exclusively from the mainstream media, and what they hear being repeated there all the time becomes their notion of truth. Most activists are living in practically the opposite world, in terms of what news they get. Even Google and Youtube adapt their results according to our search history - so, if we don't mind watching things that are little more than raw footage and we have lots of left-wing friends and grassroots groups among our Facebook contacts, we may think that the knowledge about certain facts is widespread - while it is not. QuantityShow a video of police attacking peaceful protesters to your aunt. Despite her polite and genuinely horrified reaction, she will unconsciouly believe that that is an exception rather than the rule. Send her a handful of links to videos by mail - same thing. BandwidthWe tend to forget that for most people accessing a video on the internet is a time-consuming task. It can take a minute or more to make it start playing, then a lot more if we want to seek to the middle. If our interlocutor has a short attention span - as everybody does - then bad luck. The streetsSpending more time at occupations means spending more time at places with bad or no internet. Here in Rio showing a video to a newcomer in a casual street chat is practically impossible. The people who are spending most of their time at occupations are relying on volunteers to print stuff from the internet and bring to them. Enough said. Local videos, or: a solution (for this problem)To explain how the system works, both technically and socially, I will have paint a Big-ish Picture. In it the world has these four categories of (relevant) people:
The activists create, and send to the prog people, archives in plain text formatted like this: [BYT' Primeiras manifestações ======================= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pap4N7G2rPM Material Bruto Sem Cortes RIO ALERJ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBu09di_XHE Zerovinte http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lMAxjha82U "Aqui vocês não são Advogados" ] which the prog people convert, automagically, into this format (which we will call the "pen drive format"), [BYT' Primeiras manifestações ======================= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pap4N7G2rPM Material Bruto Sem Cortes RIO ALERJ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBu09di_XHE Zerovinte http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lMAxjha82U "Aqui vocês não são Advogados" ] and also this other format, which we will call the "web format": [BYT' Primeiras manifestações ======================= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pap4N7G2rPM Material Bruto Sem Cortes RIO ALERJ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBu09di_XHE Zerovinte http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lMAxjha82U "Aqui vocês não são Advogados" ] These are the important points:
The multiplication of the prog people ===================================== The conversion from the input format to the web format is very trivial; the conversion to the pen drive format is less so, because we need to scan the directories of local copies of videos to discover that, e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHFJDTO2VE Gás lacrimogênio dentro do metro corresponds to this local file: Gs_lacrimognio_dentro_do_metro-WOHFJDTO2VE.mp4 the trick is that the identifier - "WOHFJDTO2VE" in this case - must match, but the rest of the file name doesn't matter much. When we don't have a local copy of a video, the conversor puts lines like these into a download script: # Gás lacrimogênio dentro do metro: ~/usrc/youtube-dl/youtube-dl -t -f 18 \ --write-thumbnail --restrict-filenames \ 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHFJDTO2VE' By running that script we can download exactly the files for which we don't have local copies yet. The current version of the program is written in Lua and is very short. If we keep the design simple then soon we will have implementations in several different programming languages - all different, but all doing essentially the same things. I also expect web designers to join at some point. My HTML skills are quite primitive - my specialty is to create things that are technically very simple and that do work, but usually they are visually weird and offend the tastes of Web 2.0 people. Source code =========== The source code will be packed into an easy-to-install form soon. Sample outputs ============== Take a look: http://angg.twu.net/videos-locais.html |