Category Archives: Video Archive

A/V Geeks fundraiser to digitize 100 miles of film

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A/V Geeks has done a lot of digitization of old film for The Internet Archive. They are trying to raise funds to digitize many more hours of footage to put up on archive.org which will be free to view and use by the public. If you would like to contribute here is some information:

http://www.indiegogo.com/avgeeks100miles

WHAT? The A/V Geeks have over 24,000 old 16mm educational films that we’ve rescued from landfills, dumpsters, closets, school libraries. These films cover topics from Atomic Bombs to Zoo Babies and provide an entertaining yet insightful glimpse into our past. We’ve kept these materials from being thrown out and we want to continue our mission by giving them a new life and sharing them you!

Traditionally, this means that we would have to either travel to you or you would have to travel to us to watch a film on a projector. By digitizing these films we can give you and the world access to these materials! When a film from the A/V Geeks archive is digitized and uploaded to the internet, it can be easily accessed, watched, downloaded, researched and repurposed for music videos, class projects, documentaries and more.

Help us digitize 100 Miles of Film! Instead of traveling miles to give access to these films we’d rather digitize miles of 16mm film. Film length is generally measured in feet (in the US) to where 2100 feet of film roughly equals one hour of content. With your support we can digitize and make available 100 miles of film – over 240 hours of (around 1,000 individual titles) from the archive. So we envision this as sort of a road rally. We have to go 100 miles in a short period of time. We’ll have a small team to keep the machines humming along. We aren’t sure what we’ll find with some of the films – we haven’t seen them yet!

For every $500 we raise, we digitize one mile of film (nearly 2.5 hours of material)!

Improved theora/ogg video derivatives!

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We’ve made our ogg video derivatives slightly better via:

  • minor bump up to “thusnelda” release
  • “upgrade” from 1-pass video encoding to 2-pass video encoding
  • direct ffmpeg creation of the video (you’ll need to re/compile ffmpeg minimally with “–enable-libtheora –enable-libvorbis” configure flags)

ffmpeg -y -i ‘camels.avi’ -q:vscale 3 -b:v 512k -vcodec libtheora -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf yadif,scale=400:300 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_metadata -1,g:0,g -pass 1 -an -f null /dev/null;

ffmpeg -y -i ‘camels.avi’ -q:vscale 3 -b:v 512k -vcodec libtheora -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf yadif,scale=400:300 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_metadata -1,g:0,g -pass 2 -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -acodec libvorbis -ac 2 -ab 128k -ar 44100 -metadata TITLE=’Camels at a Zoo’ -metadata LICENSE=’http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/’ -metadata DATE=’2004′ -metadata ORGANIZATION=’Dumb Bunny Productions’ -metadata LOCATION=http://archive.org/details/camels camels.ogv

some notes:

  • You’d want to adjust the “scale=WIDTH:HEIGHT” accordingly, as well as the “-r FRAMES-PER-SECOND” related args, to your source video.
  • I made a small patch to allow *both* bitrate target *and* quality level for theora in ffmpeg, after comparing the other popular tool “ffmpeg2theora” code with the libtheoraenc.c inside ffmpeg.  It may not be necessary, but I believe I saw *slightly* better quality coming out of theora/thusnelda ogg video.  For what it’s worth, my minor patch is here:  http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/patches/ffmpeg-theora.patch
  • The way we compile ffmpeg (ubuntu/linux) is here.  (Alt MacOS version here )
  • (Edited post above after I removed this step) It’s *quite* odd, I realize to have ffmpeg transcode both the audio/video together, only to split/demux them back out temporarily.  However, for some videos, the “oggz-comment” step would wipe out the first video keyframe and cause unplayability in chrome (and the expected visual artifacts for things that could play it).   So, we split, comment the audio track, then re-stitch it back together.

Lost Landscapes SF6: huge success– Next Lost Landscapes of Detroit February 22

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Standing room only for Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscape of San Francisco 6 at the Internet Archive last night.   New films including “process plates” from studios brought a new sharpness to many of the films presented.   Suggested donations was 5 bucks or 5 books, and people brought lots of great books for the Archive.

Next is Lost Landscapes of Detroit on February 22, 2012– this is Detroit without the narratives being imposed on it.   Doors open at 6:30, show at 7:30.

Thank you all!

new off-site video/audio embed codes

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We are about to rollout a “new new” video/audio player 😎

You can see it in action now with our upcoming embed codes to go with this new player.

It will allow for additional much wanted features like:
– off-site playlists
– fullscreen in many cases
– subtitles/captions

as well as the standard arbitrary width/height and “autoplay” options.

You can see some examples here:

http://www.archive.org/help/video.php

The rest is coming soon (if you are eager, you can even “opt in” now by clicking here:

http://www.archive.org/details/movies&newplayer=jw

(then take a look at one of your favorite items).

Now relax, sit back, and enjoy an archive video!

Cheers!
–tracey

improved h.264 derivatives!

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We have thoroughly tested a newer and simpler way to create h.264 derivatives!

Changes you’ll notice:

  • More pixels!  previously 320 x 240    goes to 640 x 480 pixels
  • Slightly higher video bitrate — from about 512kb/s   to   about  700kb/s bitrate
  • Switching from mp4creator container maker to ffmpeg container + qt-faststart
  • Less back-end commands to make high-quality derivative

Nice things about this derivative (similar to prior derivative):

  • Plays in adobe flash plugin
  • Plays on all versions of iphone and ipad
  • Starts quickly, nearly instant seeking even to unbuffered areas of the video

Here’s a sample of how we do it with just 3 simple commands.  (We do/you should adjust “-r” argument appropriately to your video’s frames-per-second.  We also adjust the “640” in the “-vf scale” argument to be appropriate for the video’s *actual* aspect ratio, etc.  So for example, the 640 might become 852 for 16:9 widescreen video.  Although for our .mp4 specific derivative and playback ability on iPhone (1st gen and thus all versions), we would actually downrez that to 640×360).

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.mp4


ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 -metadata title='Camels at a Zoo - http://www.archive.org/details/camels' -metadata year='2004' -metadata comment=license:'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/' tmp.mp4

qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'

our preset file:
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset

 

For the adventurous out there, you can create this same setup by building ffmpeg on mac, linux, or windows.  Linux is easy, but personally, I’m a mac gal.  So here’s some ffmpeg build tips on the mac.

Happy viewing!

 

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco

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San Francisco

The Embarcadero

On April 10, 2011 Internet Archive kicked off the Internet Archive Presents public events series with a hometown favorite, Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of San Francisco.

Culled from thousands of hours of home, commercial and institutional movies, Lost Landscapes presents San Francisco the way it was. From Gliders in the Outlands to Joe DiMaggio’s wedding to cityscapes of long gone people and places the movie offers both vitality and nostalgia. What makes the event especially vibrant is that the audience participates by shouting out places, events and people they recognize. Occassionally this results in a conversation about the backstory of these clips.

San Francisco

San Francisco Airport

With over 400 people in attendance with a suggested donation of ‘5 bucks or 5 books” it was deemed a huge success. More public events are planned.

Check out video of the event at http://www.archive.org/details/lostlandscapes2011

-Jeff Kaplan

Digitizing Balinese Lontars

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With the help of the Internet Archive and Ron Jenkins, a theater professor at Wesleyan University, the Balinese are leading the world as the first culture to have their entire literature go online. The documents are centuries-old lontar palm leaves incised on both sides with a sharp knife and then blackened with soot. As of today 477 lontars have been scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

The writings consist of ordinary texts to sacred documents on religion, holy formulas, rituals, family genealogies, law codes, treaties on medicine (usadha), arts and architecture, calendars, prose, poems and even magic. The estimated 50,000 lontars are kept by members of the Puri (palace) family and high priests to ordinary families. Some are carefully kept as family heritages while others are left in dirty and dusty corners of houses. Digitizing the lontars makes them available to scholars and students and salvages the documents from getting destroyed by insects or humidity, as many already have.

Very few Balinese have actually read any lontar due to language obstacles and the view that is it sacrilegious. Traditionally, the lontars are read and performed by priests. Forty-one of such performances have been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Gatutkaca Pralaya Nyoman Catra

Visit the Balinese Digital Library at The Internet Archive:

Balinese Digital Library collection
Collection of Lontars
Collection of Videos

Read more about this project and Balinese lontars at The Jakarta Times:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304062425/http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/01/29/ancient-‘lontar’-manuscripts-go-digital.html

US scholar brings ancient Balinese scripts to digital age | Ni Komang Erviani, Denpasar

-Grace Neveu and Jake Johnson

Edited on May 9, 2011: “Very few Balinese have actually read any lontar due to language obstacles and the view that it is sacrilegious. Traditionally, the lontars are read and performed by priests. Forty-one of such performances have been uploaded to the Internet Archive.”

The Real Mad Men

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What do Susan Sarandon, Frosty the Sno-cone Machine, Chuck Norris, Florence Henderson and Elsie the Cow have in common? They are all in vintage television commercials in the new Adviews Collection at http://www.archive.org/details/adviews.

Over 8,500 very cool, funny, weird and nostalgic old commercials of 240 different brands were digitized by Skip Elsheimer of AV Geeks at the request of the Duke University Library’s Digital Collection. These commercials were created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles or its successor, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B).

A big thank you to duke Will Sexton and Sean Aery from Duke University for this fantastic contribution. As a big fan of Mad Men and having grown up during this era it is a lot of fun to see these cultural relics.

Check it out.

-Jeff Kaplan

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