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DemocracyPlayer

Democracy Player - Deep Dive
By: Anh Nguyen
Ocotober 2006

http://www.getdemocracy.com

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY INTERNET TV?
"Democracy is a free and open way to watch, share, and broadcast video on the internet." Democracy was founded by the Participatory Culture Foundation, whose mission statement is as follows:

· Television is the defining medium of our culture. There's now an opportunity to create a television culture that is fluid, diverse, exciting, and beautiful. Built by people working together.

· The platform is open-source and built on open-standards. This matters because it keeps video flowing freely. When you lock people in to closed, proprietary services, you lose everything that makes the internet work.

· Television is moving online. Will it be the same narrow, top-down cultural stagnation that we see on traditional television? All the major media and computer companies are clamoring to control video online. If they succeed it will be a disaster.

· We don't have to spend years playing catch-up. Open-source and open- standards can lead this fight for the future of video online.

Basically they want to make media better by allowing it more interactivity, diversity, flexiblity, broadcast mediums and to be FREE. They want to 'democratize' Television and broadcasting where everyone will have a voice.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY CONSISTED OF?
Democracy has 3 main parts:
1. Democracy Player - A desktop application for watching internet TV. It is free to download and is open source, so if you know what you are doing you can help contribute to the development. The player works on MacOSX, Windows, and Linux systems. On the player is a 'Channel Guide' which is a listing of Internet TV channels, video podcasts, vlogs, RSS feeds and etc (that anyone can openly add to).

2. Broadcast Machine - Software for publishing channels (RSS feeds) of videos from your website. If your website lacks capacity to host these videos, you can Torrent the videos and reduce bandwith loads via peer to peer downloads.

3. Video Bomb - A website used for sharing videos and personal channels. Users rate videos and the most popular ones move up on the front page. It is meant to be a 'playground' for internet videos. A place where people can find and share the latest, hottest videos. Along the same lines as a youtube or google video, where you stream videos, star them, share them, leave comments and etc.

THE PASSIVE VIEWER
The most simple way to use Democracy is to treat it as a television and only use the player component. As the user, you participate passively by downloading and watching videos you've selected or have subscribed to. It is different than watching videos on webpages 'cause content providers can offer higher quality videos which can be downloaded in the background over an extended period of time- this side-steps the problem of slow loading speeds which is a major hurdle all websites are subject to.

By default, Democracy Player checks for the latest videos on Channels (feeds) you are subscribed to and downloads them automatically. This can be a little annoying if you don't want to get all the latest videos from a certain feed, but this option can be turned off by unchecking the auto download box.

For Disk Space concerns, an 'expiration' system like Tivo, is used to track how long you've had a video. After a certain amount of days (you can choose from 3 hours to 1 month), the video is automatically deleted from your system. You can also delete the videos manually if you want to get rid of a lame video right away. You can also save videos permanently by clicking the save button, at which point the expiration countdown dissappears and the video is no longer set for automatic deletion.

Another features of the Democracy Player is full screen capabilities. Like most video applications, the quality is dependant on the resolution of the video file. So if you downloaded a low-fi video, you will get low-fi results when scaling to full screen. However, if you have a decent qaulity video you can sit back, put your feet up and watch the video from a far instead of hunched over the screen. I found this especially nice 'cause my eyes hurt from being too close the computer (more so from using it too much) so in full screen mode i was able to watch the video like I watch normal television. However, I still have to go back to the mouse and keyboard after the video is finished, unless I am happy with what is automatically qeued up. A remote control would make the experience more like standard broadcast television. Perhaps not having a remote is a good thing, because normal television is too passive and you end up behaving like a brain dead couch potato. But this is a topic for another discussion.

If you like a video, you can give it a thumbs up by 'bombing' the video (which is a good thing). There has been some confusion with the term 'bombing'. A lot of people were afraid of bombing a video because they didn't know if it was a good or bad thing. To the extreme, some users thought 'bombing' would delete the video from their computer or render it unwatchable. With all this confusion, Democracy has opted for the more traditional star. Now you can 'star' a video, which ups the star rating of the video on www.videoBomb.com.

VideoBomb.com uses web video players like YouTube video player, google video player, veOh player, and etc. It acts mainly as a video sharing guide. If I found some cool videos, I can star them at which point they are added to my bomb list. With tis list, I can share my favorite videos with my friends. Also, my friends can subscribe to my bomb list like an RSS feed and they can download the video automatically via their Democracy Player.

Another feature of videoBomb is the comments section which can be quite useful. For example there is a video called 'freak Bear in zoo' that is on the videoBomb front page. I clicked on it to see what this was all about and found it was a polar bear bobbing its head up and down while doing some interesting footwork as if it were dancing to music. Most people like myself would have thought this video somewhat amusing, until I read the following comment: "The bear is doing that because it has gone crazy from the confinement. That swaying is a common symptom in zoo polar bears. Not funny, cruel." This comments section adds a reaction layer to the videos, which is nice because it can add more value or inform the viewer about something they would otherwise have been clueless to, such as the 'dancing' symptom of polar bears going crazy from confinement.

For finding videos with the Democracy Player, the main tool is the Channel Guide, which has over 700 channels. The channel guide is an alright tool, but is kind of hard to find good channels (perhaps because there are very few good channels out there). The few channels I subscribe to are Frederator, Systm and the Make video Blog. They are basically pre-established sites, content producers that I am familiar with and trust. There are quite a few channels to browse through, which I haven't spent much time doing yet. You basically have to look around in order to find channels that meets your tastes.

THE ACTIVE USER
For Videomakers and content producers, Democracy allows you to create a channel and share high resolution videos without high bandwidth costs. Anyone can make a channel with their own content and once published to the channel guide, anyone can subscribe/ download videos from your channel.

So how do we create a channel and publish videos for everyone to see?

There are a couple different ways to make a channel for users to access your content:

1) Creating a channel with your current website:

- The first thing you need to do is download Broadcast Machine software. The file you download is a .zip file.

- After decompressing the file, you will have a 'bm' directory which you will need to put in your public_html directory of your website. For example I added Broadcast Machine to my ITP site by uploading the bm directory into my public directory on the itp server. http://www.itp.nyu.edu/~ttn206/bm/

- After you've uploaded the 'bm' directory, you need to create some additional directories and change the permissions of those directories in order for them to be properly accessible. You can have the directories created and permissions changed automatically by entering your FTP username, FTP password and website folder (in my case /home/ttn206/public_html/bm/).

Personally I like to do these things manually just to make sure they are done properly. So you can do this with a typical FTP client, such as Fetch, Fugu, CuteFTP, etc. Here are the instructions from Democracy verbatim:

"With a typical FTP program: Create folders in your Broadcast Machine directory named "torrents", "data", "publish", "thumbnails" and "text". Then select each folder, view its permissions, and make sure all the checkboxes (readable, writable, executable) are checked (should say 777 when correct). Reload this page to continue."

Here are the commands if you have shell access to your server:

Log in and type the following:

cd

/home/ttn206/public_html/bm/
mkdir data
mkdir torrents
mkdir publish
mkdir text
mkdir thumbnails
chmod 777 data
chmod 777 torrents
chmod 777 publish
chmod 777 text
chmod 777 thumbnails

Note: giving the directories "777" permissions will allow anyone on the server to full access those directories. If you share a server with others, they may be able to tamper with you Broadcast Machine data files if you use these settings. There may be other settings more appropriate for your server. Please, contact your system administrator if you have any questions about permissions."

- Once you've completed these steps, reload this page to continue.

- After reloading the page you will be prompted to create a new account, which is the standard username, email and password.

- Once you've created a user account for the Broadcast Machine, you are taken to the Broadcast Machine Dashboard which is an admin page for your videos and channels. The first thing I did was check my settings and adjusted them to my likings. The only thing I changed was the look from white to normal.

- Next I wanted to 'Publish' some videos. There are 3 options for this.

1. Upload the file directly to the server. This option is limited by the maximum upload size for your server (most set limits around 2-3 Megabytes). This option is just like uploading a video to your website.

2. The second option is to "Link to the file". I already have some videos online at my personal and ITP web pages, so I linked to these files. With this option you are prompted for the url of the video file: My first example: http://itp.nyu.edu/~ttn206/usbMang320x240.mov You then add a 'Title' for the video and an optional 'Description'. There are additional optional input fields for: Thumbnail, Creative Commons Liscense, Creator, Copyright Holder, Keywords/ Tags, People Involved & their role, Transcript, Associated Webpage, Release Date, Play Length, Contains Explicit Content (checkbox) & Timestamp. For my first post, I just entered the required information which was URL and Title, then clicked the 'Publish' button.

3. The third option is to "Post a Torrent". This requires you to download 'Broadcast Machine Helper' which makes uploading torrents a bit easier. After decompressing the downloaded .zip file, you will need to "drag 'BM Helper' into your appications folder (for MAC) and run the program once, after quitting your browser. This will install the plugin that helps simplify torrent posting." Now when you post a torrent file, a torrent uploader window opens where you can select the file. There are quite a few problems with the torrent method, but the benifits are that you save on bandwidth costs which is crucial for hig quality, big video files. Here is the link for the FAQ on torrents: http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast/help/torrent_posting.php

Note: If you upload the same file via a couple different methods, make sure to include the method (direct download, torrent, linked) in the file name so people will know which download method to choose from, otherwise it looks like a bunch of the same files with the same file name, which is annoying and confusing.

Other ways to Publish your Channel and videos

2) On Blip.TV http://www.blip.tv/ Blip is a free service that provides you with your own Democracy-compatible video blog.

3) On Video Bomb: http://www.videobomb.com/ With Video Bomb you can link to ('bomb') interesting videos that you find on the web and it will pull them into a channel-- it's easy. Video Bomb does not provide hosting, so the videos need to be available online somewhere first.

4) On your website with your existing CMS: If you already have a content management system on your website that will let users post videos, you can generate compatible RSS feeds to give everyone a channel.

I'VE CREATED A CHANNEL, NOW HOW DO I GET MY CHANNEL ON THE DEMOCRACY PLAYER?
PART 1: CREATE A RSS FEED:
http://www.getdemocracy.com/help/feeds.php

The first thing you need to do is create a RSS feed of your channel.

For those who already have RSS feeds or a content management system "can make their RSS feeds compatible with Democracy without using Broadcast Machine. In fact, most feeds that have video content in links or enclosures will already work in Democracy. However, these feeds may lack thumbnail images and other video metadata, which we think is crucial for your viewers (and makes your channel look a lot cooler)."

An easy technique for creating a RSS feed is with the 'Broadcast Machine' software. When you click on the 'Channels' Tab, you will see your channel name with the description. Below that are two links: 'Channel Front Page' and 'RSS Feed'. Click on the 'RSS Feed' link and that will generate a xml file that gets downloaded to your computer. Upload that text file to your webpage and it will act as your RSS feed. For example i uploaded mine to my public directory: http://itp.nyu.edu/~ttn206/mangTV.rss

Democracy prefers RSS feeds of the following type:
- RSS 2.0 http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
- with Yahoo Media extensions http://search.yahoo.com/mrss
- USM - Universal Subscription Mechanism http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/usm.html

PART 2: ADDING YOUR CHANNEL TO DEMOCRACY CHANNEL GUIDE

Before adding your channel, make sure the RSS feed works with Democracy Player by clicking 'Add Channel' button and entering your RSS feed link. If it is setup properly, Democracy Player will see your channel. Also, download your video and watch it to make sure everything went through.

After verifying that your RSS feed works, goto the bottom right corner of the Democracy Player and click the 'Submt a Channel' link. This will take you to a webpage where you have to log in with the account you created when publishing videos with 'Broadcast Machine'. This page will ask for your RSS feed link, the name of your channel, a description, genres, tags, and etc. They recommend and so do I that you have an image to represent your channel. This is not necessary but makes your channel infinitely more appealing compared to the generic no image icon. The preferred dimesion for the channel image is 360x240 pixels with a total size of less than 40kb. Each video in your channel has its own video thumbnail with a recommended size of 200x133px.

It takes about 24 hours for your channel to be approved by the Democracy board, to verify that it works and doesn't contain questionable content.

Updating my channel was a little confusing. After my initial test video worked I wanted to add more videos, which I did via Broadcast Machine. After uploading or linking to my new video, I clicked on 'view my frontpage' link which shows me all the videos on my channel. Click on the 'Subscribe -> RSS' link, which will generate a feed url: feed://itp.nyu.edu/~ttn206/bm/rss/1

Copy and paste that feed url into democracy player or iTunes or any RSS reading app and people will have access to your channel.

ADDING YOUR CHANNEL/ FEED INTO iTUNES

iTunes does not completely follow correct RSS standards, so you will need to enable the 'Direct URLs' option (which changes the way that Broadcast Machine links to videos on the web and in the RSS feed) in order for iTunes to see your channel. You do this by checking the 'Direct URLs' option in your Broadcast Machine Settings Tab. Before you can do that though, you have to change ther permission of your bm/.htaccess so that it is read, writeable, executeable.

Here is an example how I did mine via ssh in unix command line:
- ssh into my itp.nyu.edu account
- cd public_html/bm
- touch .htaccess
- chmod 777 .htaccess
- ls -l .htaccess (to verify permissions on the file)

After changing the permissions on your .htaccess file the 'Direct URLs' checkbox appears and you can check it to make a iTunes compatible RSS feed.

In iTunes select Adavanced->Subscribe to Podcast then enter the link to your RSS feed. Now iTunes is subcribed to your channel and you can distribute your channel via this popular application.

COMPRESSING AND ENCODING VIDEOS
http://www.getdemocracy.com/make/channel-guide/encoding.php

Here are some basic guidelines to work by:

- Don't use Real or Windows Media format, since our player won't support it completely.
- They recommend making files using the MPEG 4 codec that end in the extension .mp4. Democracy player will play these, and so will Quicktime.
- If you want full DVD quality, use MPEG2, which is the DVD format. However, MPEG2 files are much larger than MPEG4 and will take longer to download.

Cool site. Thank you!

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