Metavid is a free-software wiki-based community archive project for audio video media. The site hosts public domain US legislative footage. It was started as a Digital Arts/New Media MFA thesis project of Michael Dale and Abram Stern under the advisement of Professor Warren Sack in late 2005 at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge ...

. Its continued development is supported by a grant from the

Sunlight Foundation The Sunlight Foundation was an American 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocated for open government. The organization was founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United State ...

. It works by using a "simple Linux box to record everything that

C-SPAN Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN ) is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises many proceedings of the United Stat ...

shoots", which can then be used to provide "brief searchable clips using closed-captioning text".

Metavid Archive

Metavid has been archiving since early 2006 and hosts over a thousand of hours of US House and

Senate A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the e ...

floor footage. Originally metavid hosted house and senate committees but they were taken down in response to legal threats by CSPAN. As of late 2007 C-SPAN has adopted a more liberal copyright policy. The Metavid archive hosts the largest free & reusable archive of house and senate legislative footage. Through a partnership with

archive.org The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music ...

the original mpeg2s are made accessible through the metavid site. The US House launched its own video site and repository in 2010 and the Senate followed in 2011. As these content sources became available, Metavid stopped archiving these chambers due to the labor-intensive process of separating proprietary C-SPAN content from public domain floor proceedings.{{Citation needed, date=August 2017

Metavid Software

Metavid is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

platform for online communities to engage with audio/video media assets. The site encodes video in patent unencumbered

ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality di ...

video. The Metavid software is built on top of

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Website, websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sit ...

and Semantic Mediawiki, enabling semantic temporal metadata for media streams. Metavid also features basic sequencing and th
mv_embed
library that enables remote embedding of hosted clips with associated transcripts. Metadata such as transcripts are exported in CMML, an open xml standard developed by Annodex foundation to exchange of temporal metadata. All media and metadata is accessible in a temporal namespace enabling requesting and serving of arbitrary time segments of media and associated metadata. Metavid was presented a
wikimania07
and a

References

MediaWiki websites MediaWiki extensions Semantic wikis Semantic wiki software