Category Archives: Audio Archive

new video and audio player — video multiple qualities, related videos, and more!

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Many of you have already noticed that since the New Year, we have migrated our new “beta” player to be the primary/default player, then to be the only player.

We are excited about this new player!
It features the very latest release of jwplayer from longtailvideo.com.

Here’s some new features/improvements worth mentioning:

  • html5 is now the default — flash is a fallback option.  a final fallback option for most items is a “file download” link from the “click to play” image
  • videos have a nice new “Related Videos” pane that shows at the end of playback
  • should be much more reliable — I had previously hacked up a lot of the JS and flash from the jwplayer release version to accommodate our various wants and looks — now we use mostly the stock player with minimal JS alterations/customizations around the player.
  • better HD video and other quality options — uploaders can now offer multiple video size and bitrate qualities.  If you know how to code web playable (see my next post!) h.264 mp4 videos especially, you can upload different qualities of our source video and the viewer will have to option to pick any of them (see more on that below).
  • more consistent UI and look and feel.  The longtailvideo team *really* cleaned up and improved their UI, giving everything a clean, consistent, and aesthetically pleasing look.  Their default “skin” is also greatly improved, so we can use that now directly too
  • lots of cleaned up performance and more likely to play in more mobile, browsers, and and OS combinations under the hood.

Please give it a try!

-tracey

 

For those of you interested in trying multiple qualities, here’s a sample video showing it:

http://archive.org/details/kittehs

To make that work, I made sure that my original/source file was:

  • h.264 video
  • AAC audio
  • had the “moov atom” at the front (to allow instant playback without waiting to download entire file first) (search web for “qt-faststart” or ffmpeg’s “-movflags faststart” option, or see my next post for how we make our .mp4 here at archive.org)
  • has a > 480P style HD width/height
  • has filename ending with one of:   .HD.mov   .HD.mp4   .HD.mpeg4    .HD.m4v

When all of those are true, our system will automatically take:

  • filename.HD.mov

and create:

  • filename.mp4

that is our normal ~1000 kb/sec “derivative” video, as well as “filename.ogv”

The /details/ page will then see two playable mpeg-4 h.264 videos, and offer them both with the [HD] toggle button (seen once video is playing) allowing users to pick between the two quality levels.

If you wanted to offer a *third* quality, you could do that with another ending like above but with otherwise the same requirements.  So you could upload:

  • filename.HD.mp4       (as, say, a 960 x 540 resolution video)
  • filename.HD.mpeg4   (as, say, a 1920 x 1080 resolution video)

and the toggle would show the three options:   1080P, 540P, 480P

You can update existing items if you like, and re-derive your items, to get multiple qualities present.

Happy hacking!

 

 

 

getting only certain formats in .zip files from items — new feature

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Per some requests from our friends in the Live Music Archive community…

You can get any archive.org item downloaded to your local machine as a .zip file (that we’ve been doing for 5+ years!)
But whereas before it would be all files/formats,
now you can be pick/selective about *just* certain formats.

We’ll put links up on audio item pages, minimally, but the url pattern is simple for any item.
It looks like (where you replace IDENTIFIER with the identifier of your item (eg: thing after archive.org/details/)):

http://archive.org/compress/IDENTIFIER

for the entire item, and for just certain formats:

http://archive.org/compress/IDENTIFIER/formats=format1,format2,format3,….

Example:


wget -q -O - 'http://archive.org/compress/ellepurr/formats=Metadata,Checksums,Flac' > zip; unzip -l zip
Archive: zip
Length Date Time Name
--------- ---------- ----- ----
1107614 2012-10-30 19:49 elle.flac
44 2012-10-30 19:49 ellepurr.md5
3114 2012-10-30 19:49 ellepurr_files.xml
693 2012-10-30 19:49 ellepurr_meta.xml
602 2012-10-30 19:49 ellepurr_reviews.xml
--------- -------
1112067 5 files

Enjoy!!

LibriVox Free Audiobook Project Receives Generous Mellon Support for Upgrade

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LibriVox.org, the world’s largest producer of free public domain audiobooks, and the Internet Archive are pleased to announce a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, on the heels of a recent landmark achievement: 100 million downloads of the over 5,000 free LibriVox audiobooks from the Internet Archive.

The Mellon grant will go towards rebuilding LibriVox’s technical infrastructure, and improving accessibility of the LibriVox website.

“It’s fantastic to get this support from the Mellon Foundation,” said LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire. “It will be put to good use, helping our hard-working volunteers create many more free audiobooks.”

LibriVox, a volunteer project of the Internet Archive, gets volunteers from around the world to make audio recordings of public domain texts, and gives those recordings away for free. All LibriVox audiobooks are hosted at the Internet Archive.

Founded in 2005, LirbiVox has to date produced 5,371 free audiobooks, in 31 languages. Popular audiobooks include “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, and “Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë. In addition to novels, the LibriVox collection includes numerous texts of importance from philosophers such as Kant, Descartes, and Hume, political documents such as the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and scientific texts including Einstein’s “Relativity,” and Darwin’s “Origin of the Species.”

“The LibriVox collection is one of the most popular on the Internet Archive,” said Brewster Kahle, Founder and Director of the Internet Archive. “100 million downloads is awesome. LibriVox is an integral part of our commitment to making important texts available to the world in the best format for people, and we are thrilled at the support from the Mellon Foundation.”

Cori Samuel, a long-time LibriVox volunteer, who has recorded some of the project’s more popular books, was in shock at the numbers. “It’s hard to believe that what started out as a small project among some passionate people on the web has turned into something so big. It’s incredible to imagine that we could have touched the lives of 100 million listeners.”

For more information, please contact Hugh McGuire, LibriVox founder: hughmcguire@gmail.com.   Job posting.

Archive-It Team Encourages Your Contributions To The “Occupy Movement” Collection

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Since September 17th, 2011 when protesters descended on Wall Street, set up tents, and refused to move until their voices were heard, an impassioned plea for economic and social equality has manifested itself in similar protests and demonstrations around the world. Inspired by “Occupy Wall Street (OWS)”, these global protests and demonstrations are collectively now being referred to as the “Occupy Movement”.

In an effort to document these historic, and politically and socially charged, events as they unfold, IA’s Archive-It team has recently created an “Occupy Movement” collection to begin capturing information about the movement found online. With blogs communicating movement ideals and demands, social media used to coordinate demonstrations, and news related websites portraying the movement from a dizzying variety of angles, the presence and representation of the Occupy Movement online is both hugely valuable to our understanding of the movement as a whole, while constantly in-flux and at-risk.

The value of the collection hinges on the diversity, depth, and breadth of our seeds and websites we crawl. We are asking and encouraging anyone with websites they feel are important to archive, sites that tell a story about the movement, to pass them along and we will add them to the Occupy Movement collection. These might include movement-wide or city-specific websites, sites with images, blogs, YouTube videos, even Twitter accounts of individuals or organizations involved with the movement. No ideas or additions are too small or too large; perhaps your ideas or suggestions will be a unique part of the movement not yet represented in our collection. IA Archive-It friends and partners are already sending in seeds, which we greatly appreciate.

The web content captured in this collection will be included in the General Archive collection at http://www.archive.org/details/occupywallstreet
which has been actively collecting materials on the Occupy Movement for a few months.

Please send any seeds suggestions, questions, or comments to Graham at graham@archive.org.

new audio/video player — safari/IE improvements

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below the current audio/video player on archive.org you have probably seen by now the link:

Would you like to try our new audio/video player? (beta!)

We had some known problems in this beta rollout that affected audio MP3 playback.

Specifically, on Safari, some 30-70% of the time (and it varied widely) the MP3 loading/setup would fail.  This has been fixed.   On Internet Explorer, we didn’t have the MP3 “flash based playback” option setup using the new audio player — and the lead developer, Michael Dale, came over today and fixed that for us.   Hooray!

So at this point, I believe the audio/video player is true “beta” — feature complete with a few things to smooth out left but the finish line is close:

1) i need to add back in captions/subtitles (it’s there in the player, just need to feed them through with our playlist)

2) video items with 3+ videos may play the last video 2x.  working on that!  😎

hopefully, we can all listen to some nice archive music this weekend in peace without issues with this new player!  now grab your headphones or turn up those speakers…

-tracey

Jules Verne

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A colleague here at Internet Archive suggested that I post on the birthday of the French author Jules Verne.  He wrote about space, air and underwater travel before practical means of those types of travel had been invented. He is referred to as one of the Fathers of Science Fiction.

We have quite a few of his works at archive.org in a variety of mediatypes.

Starting from inside the planet and working out:

Journey To The Center Of The Earth

A librivox recording of the book
http://www.archive.org/details/ajourneytothecen19513gut

A text version
http://www.archive.org/details/AJourneyToTheCenterOfTheEarth

20,000 Leagues Under The Seas

A Disney version is available for browserlending:
http://www.archive.org/details/20000leaguesunde00walt

A 1916 silent movie:
http://www.archive.org/details/20000LeaguesUndertheSea

An old time radio CBS Radio Adventure Theater broadcast:
http://www.archive.org/details/20000LeaguesUnderTheSea_965

A librivox audio recording:
http://www.archive.org/details/20000_leagues_under_the_seas_librivox

Around The World In 80 Days

A librivox recording:
http://www.archive.org/details/around_the_world1_librivox

A Gutenberg Junior book text version:
http://www.archive.org/stream/80day10a/80day10a.txt

and last but not least, wallpapers from the Jackie Chan Disney movie:
http://www.archive.org/details/tucows_365552_Around_the_World_in_80_Days_-_1

All Around The Moon

A Gutenberg Project text:
http://www.archive.org/details/allaroundthemoon16457gut

Other texts include The Works of Jules Verne:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Works%20of%20Jules%20Verne%3A%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts%20AND%20sponsor%3AMSN

And an audio recording of Master Of The World:
http://www.archive.org/details/master_of_world_mfs_librivox

A number of his works can be found in French as well:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Jules%20Verne%22

Enjoy the journeys.

-Jeff Kaplan

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

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On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day I found a number of items of interest. I’ve included some descriptions written by the uploaders.

“I Have A Dream” speech from August 28, 1963
Often referred to as one of the greatest speeches in American history.

The March On Washington (1963):
Scenes from Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C., August 1963. People walking up sidewalk; gathering on Mall, standing, singing. Lincoln Memorial with crowds gathered around reflecting pool. People singing and clapping at speakers platform. Speakers, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Crowd swaying, singing, holding hands.

Integration Report I (1960):
A documentary showing sit-ins, marches, boycotts and rallies in 1959 and 1960. Includes such events as the first mass marches in Montgomery, Alabama, reactions against police brutality in Brooklyn and protests against the prejudiced treatment of Negroes in court.

Democracy Now! Monday, January 18, 2010:
Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King. He was born January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic of US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. We play his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which he delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountain Top,” that he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated.

The New Negro (1957). An interview with Martin Luther King Jr.: Guests: Martin Luther King with J. Waites Waring.

-Jeff Kaplan

Over 1 Million Digital Books Now Available Free to the Print-Disabled

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Associated Press Story The books on our Open Library site.

Press release:

jessie-and-talking-book-device_thumb.jpg

More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, today the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books — from classic 19th century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials — now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or are otherwise visually impaired.

“Every person deserves the opportunity to enhance their lives through access to the books that teach, entertain and inspire,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “Bringing access to huge libraries of books to the blind and print disabled is truly one of benefits of the digital revolution.”

Kahle also announced that the Internet Archive will be investing in the growth of its virtual bookshelf by funding the digitization of the first 10,000 books donated. Individuals and organizations are welcome to donate their favorite book or a collection of books. Books in all languages welcome. To donate books visit: http://openlibrary.org/bookdrive

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “Blind people must have access to repositories of digital information if we are to reach our goal of becoming full and equal participants in society. Access to the books that have been scanned by the Internet Archive in a format accessible to the blind will be another step toward that goal. We are excited about continuing to work with Internet Archive to make access to more books a reality.”

The 1 million+ books in the Internet Archive’s library for print disabled, are scanned from hard copy books then digitized into DAISY — a specialized format used by blind or other persons with disabilities, for easy navigation. Files are downloaded to devices that translate the text and read the books aloud for the user to enjoy. To access books visit: http://openlibrary.org/subjects/accessible_book

Jessie Lorenz is a 31 year old woman who was born blind and is the Associate Director of at the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco. She believes, “Knowledge is power – and like everyone else, blind and print disabled people need equitable access to books to help them be innovative, productive, contributing community members.”

Older books are available from the Internet Archive’s unencrypted DAISY library and modern books can be accessed by “qualified users” through their NLS key — an encrypted code provided by the Library of Congress’ National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), that is dedicated to providing materials to the print disabled. Currently, over 800,000 people in the US are registered with the Library of Congress as being print disabled.

As of today, the Internet Archive offers over one million books for print disabled people. Other large libraries for the print disabled including NLS, Bookshare.org, and Reading for the Blind & Dyslexic.

“This demonstrates why having open and public access to published works is so important,” said Kahle.

Ben Foss, President of Headstrong, an advocacy group for people with dyslexia said, “As dyslexic and print-disabled students scramble to complete their end-of-year research papers and projects, beginning today, there is a great new library of resources that will expand the tools these young people need to be successful in school and in life.”

By leveraging automated scanning and conversion processes, Internet Archive technicians can conduct a cost-efficient scan of more than one thousand books per day. Books are scanned at sites located in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other major cities in five countries. Most of the older scanned books have been reformatted for the print-disabled from broad digitizing projects. Scanned physical books came from the collections of over 150 libraries, most of which are in the Open Content Alliance, but others as well. The funding of those scanning projects is coming from foundations, corporations and governments.

Most of the older books have been scanned from library collections, with newer books having been donated to the Internet Archive by companies such as the online bookseller Alibris, libraries and individuals.

The print disabled collection of books are now available through the Archive’s new Open Library site (www.openlibrary.org), which serves as a gateway to information about millions of hardcopy books and more than 1 million electronic books.

The Internet Archive will continually increase the number books it makes available. They are currently seeking donations of books and ebooks from individuals, libraries and publishers. The Archive is announcing today its commitment to fund the scanning and automatic processing of the first 10,000 donated books. Any organization or individual that would like to make particular books or collections available are encouraged to donate them by sending them to the Internet Archive. For donations of large collections please contact the Internet Archive. Financial support is also welcome to expand the program.

To access all books, a United States resident with print disabilities must register with the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/nls/signup.html .

###

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that was founded to build an Internet library. Its missions are to offer universal access to all knowledge and provide specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco California 94118, info@archive.org, www.archive.org, www.openlibrary.org, +1-415-561-6767.

Press contact: Pattie Haubner phaubner@douglasgould.com
(914) 833-7093, (914) 275-2984

MP3 clip of a talking book, and Jessie Lorenz with a talking book device. Photo 1 and 2 of Jessie working with archive staff on user interface.

USATODAY article: Millions of books get digitized for the disabled

New Support for HTML5 audio tag!

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We just rolled out the tag support option for our audio files (which is similar to our tag support that we have had as an option for a bit).

So patrons can now opt to not use our flash plugin for audio file playback with relatively modern browsers (Safari v4+, Firefox v3.5+, Chrome, etc.) that support the new audio/video HTML5 tags.  For such browsers, you can visit an item and then look below where the normal player would be and click “Would you like to try the new audio tag?”  If you prefer this way of listening, we give you the option to set a cookie to make archive audio/video items always use this (non-flash) option.

Enjoy!

-Tracey Jaquith

October 1962…Camelot in Crisis

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Being a fan of MadMen and also being old enough to have experienced “duck and cover”, these recordings are just a revelation:
http://www.archive.org/details/dictabelt_cassette_a http://www.archive.org/details/dictabelt_cassette_b

There’s the Mississippi University Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hey, there’s Bobby Kennedy, then the Attorney General. Also, Archibald Cox who was later fired by Richard Nixon (well, Robert Bork actually did the firing). And, Ted Sorenson who is attributed with largely authoring the inaugural “ask not” address. Wait…it’s little Jerry Brown being put on the phone to talk to JFK by his dad, California Governor Pat Brown. Mentions of Hubert, Adlai and Eisenhower.

I couldn’t stop listening until I heard all of them. Check them out.

-Jeff Kaplan