sandbox films

Jim Dwyer's article, City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention, in today's Sunday edition of the New York Times confirms a long-held suspicion -- Bikes Against Bush was under surveillance by law enforcement. I'm not sure how to react at the moment, and will try to compose a more thoughtful response soon. For those who haven't seen the videos, here is the raw, on-the-street footage of the arrest, and here is the version that aired on MSNBC's Hardball. Here is the original prototype video of Bikes Against Bush.

click here to download Jen and I went to see Al Franken perform at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco on Aug. 26. It was a benefit event for his Midwestern Values PAC organization. He performed several bits I had heard before from his radio show and also from some of his books. It was hysterical though. Afterwards, he signed autographs and spoke to people from the edge of the stage where we got to meet him briefly. His documentary, God Spoke, is now playing in San Francisco... we'll have to see it. You could be looking at the next senator from Minnesota.

It seems the Google Video Getter Greasemonkey script I wrote a while back has become very popular. It was on Digg.com, and since then I've gotten tons of inquiries and comments about it. The Google Video service is still in beta and changes regularly. As such I've had to update the script a few times to keep it functional with their changes. Here's the latest... Google Video now uses javascript to load the Flash Player. This kind of breaks the method used previously by my Greasemonkey script because it essentially tries to hide the HTML that the script was searching for. Not to worry though, it was a pretty easy fix. I also tightened up the code to a mere 3 lines! Click here to install the new Google Video Getter 2 So why do you need this script? Doesn't Google offer downloads for their free videos? ... yes and no. If you go to any free video offering on Google Video and click the Download button for "Mac and Windows" it forces you to download a Google Video Player application to playback Google's own .gvp video format. These videos do not play in other applications. I checked out the .gvp file, and its really just a text file with a pointer to a video file on the web... I copied the code and manually downloaded the video referenced and discovered it was a .avi (presumably DivX), but it would not play in Windows Media Player because it uses a DRM scheme for file protection. There are alternative download options for the free videos though. These include videos formatted for the Video iPod and Sony PSP. I haven't really tried these, but I assume they don't have the same DRM protection since they need to be able to play on those devices. So really, you don't need this script at all. You can download the videos formatted for iPod and PSP from Google Video. But for some reason, people often write me and leave comments asking for this script and how to make it work again.

Lucas Gonze picked up on my argument with Xeni Jardin regarding YouTube and the SNL Lazy Sunday fiasco. His deconstruction of the issue is pretty interesting: Both Josh and Xeni are part of the bleeding edge, and not long ago it would have been very surprising to see such a stark difference in their views. What this exchange shows is that lightnet is a new fault line in digital politics. Is the work at hand about samizdat, as Xeni thinks, or about participatory media, as Josh thinks? I confess, I had to look up samizdat on Wikipedia: Samizdat (Russian: самиздат) was the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries. The idea was that copies were made a few at a time, and anyone who had a copy would make more copies, often by handwriting or typing, because copy machines were guarded by what Mikhail Bulgakov called "the secret service" (see KGB, Soviet censorship). This made me think of Kenyatta's post about Lightnet v. Darknet a few months back where he describes the role Darknets play in disseminating suppressed information in opressive circumstances. This is true samizdat and I agree that an underground economy can help empower the oppressed and lead to important social outcomes.... for instance, distribution of the photos from Abu Gharib could circulate through P2P networks and other Darknets in a way that protects the identities of the distributors and disseminates the information effectively. However, redistribution of pirated Saturday Night Live videos is hardly a cause worth fighting for, and that seems to be what YouTube has really attached its star to. Its really unfortunate when such a high-profile (read, high traffic) site like YouTube serves as a bad example. It reflects poorly on everyone working hard to enable a true participatory media culture. I think Lucas hit it on the head by saying Lightnet is the fault line here, and I think its something truly worth fighting for.

From the NYTimes: Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, said she contacted NBC Universal about working out a deal to feature NBC clips, including "Lazy Sunday," on the site. NBC Universal responded early this month with a notice asking YouTube to remove about 500 clips of NBC material from its site or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.Since when does a failure to respond equate to permission granted? There are three little words that apply to any form of expression, whether you agree with it or not... those words are "all rights reserved." If there is nothing saying "permission granted" then by default it is "all rights reserved." These three words are important to any content creator, whether they happen to be NBC Universal or my cousin filming her cat. YouTube in fact recognized that the video was plaigarized and contacted NBC to "work out a deal," meanwhile YouTube continued to host and redistribute the video after a lack of response from NBC. I guess YouTube assumed that meant they had permission? They have lawyers, right? I mean, they are a VC funded company.

Update: Pete has added these files to EmbedTheVideo.com. Please go there and Embed The Video! -- Feb. 5, 2006 I made this video popup maker thingie a while back. It was going to be part of the Vlogging Hacks book that Jay, Ryanne, Michael, and I were writing for O'Reilly. Sadly, the book got cancelled and I pushed the project to the back burner. I never wrote about it here on this blog, but I did write about it on Unmediated. The reasons for using this approach are very practical. It preserves the direct link in the blog entry for services like FeedBurner, while also providing an embedded video experience that works in any browser.... including Internet Explorer. I find myself writing a ton of similar emails to the Videoblogging List about this... whenever some issue comes up about embedded Quicktime, or Quicktime not working in IE (don't believe the rumors), I fire off a similar email that has now been enshrined by Pete on a newly christened domain, EmbedTheVideo.com. (Note to self: maybe I should actually keep a draft and copy-paste the text each time). Some people have asked for the PHP code used in the popup window. Here it is: Download popup.txt (rename it from .txt to .php) You can simply copy and edit the page for the popup code generator since its all javascript/html. Simply "View Source" and copy the code to a new document: http://joshkinberg.com/popupmaker It should work for any Quicktime or Windows Media videos... I never got around to adding support for Flash SWF, FLV, or RealPlayer, but it should be really easy to do. I just never took the time to do it. Ah, the lonely back burner. Enjoy!

Its been a long week at camp FireAnt. We launched new versions of our software for Mac and Windows (Download Now), and also a shiny new website at FireAnt.tv. The website is the most significant upgrade. It is sort of like a "TV Guide" for videoblogs. Users can log in to rate and tag channels and episodes, and also build a personal Queue of episodes to download a la carte with FireAnt. Over time we will add lots of new features to help people discover video and share with friends. But, before we get to that stuff we need to upgrade our server. Its been running pretty hot due to the heavy traffic we're getting from sites like Digg.com and others. We've done as much optimizing as we can. Now we know we need to take it up a notch and throw more iron at it (the server we're using was something I rent at $50/mo. anyway). Even though we're dealing with all the feedback and trying to hold our server together, the response has been extremely positive. I can't say enough how good it feels to simply ship code out into the wild. Now that we've got the basis of the platform up and running we'll be able to expand on top of it and make it a little better each week. On that note, our first seemingly small improvement is actually something not small at all... we've added a 1-click subscription method. The great thing about it is that it's really easy. Check out our Really Simple Subscription Button Maker. Enter your feed URL, copy the code, and paste it into your site. That's it! When a user clicks this button it will launch a little popup window containing a short explanation of subscription, a link to download FireAnt if they don't already have it, and a link to launch FireAnt and auto-subscribe to the RSS channel (so its actually 2-clicks). You can check it out in the sidebar of my blog right here! More to come, so stay tuned....

I got a ton of responses when I posted a couple Greasemonkey scripts to download videos from Google Video and YouTube a while back... mostly because the blog entry made it to the front page of Digg.com. Since then I've gotten tons of requests to make scripts to download videos from all sorts of different sites.... Here's another to download videos from Reuters: Install Reuters Video Getter As usual, this is a Greasemonkey script, so you'll need Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Then you can simply right-click the above link and choose, "install user script". Once installed, this script will place a download link at the top of any page of http://today.reuters.com/tv/. You can right-click the link to save the Flash video (FLV) file to your computer. You can then play the video with an FLV player like this one. Or you could transcode the video to another format to edit or take with you on a portable device using something like this. See the screenshot below to see what this script does:

An example of advertising in new media. Heavy.com has what looks like a Beta version a social network, MySpace-like, Flash-heavy site called MyHeavy.com. I'm not sure if the content is really live or if its just a demo. Its somewhat of a Flash Desktop in the context of a MySpace community. The UI renders painfully slow and I guess you could do much of the (mostly useless) UI widgets with AJAX. One cool aspect of the experience was the Playlist tool. This allows users to assemble a playlist of their favorite music... many sites have something like this. Here's the interesting part... you launch a person's playlist and it loads a Flash music player in a pop up with advertising in the form of a branded animation synched with beat-tracking to match the music. In this screenshot you see an animation of a DJ spinning records branded by Honda. You also see banner ads displaying Honda's brand. The music playing is A Tribe Called Quest, and the playlist was created by "Ghostfucker." The animation is simply the hand spinning the record, cutting back and forth somewhat synched to the rhythm. There are lighting effects synched to the music too, though at the moment of this image capture it was a little dark. Just interesting to see how people are beginning to monetize playlist creation and audiovisualizers.

Just when I thought the script I had written was obsolete and Google was actually providing downloadable files, I learn from the astute comments here that the Google Video downloads do not actually download a file that will play in common media players, but instead a .gvp file that only plays in some kind of Google Video Player. Not only that, but the file streams the video from the web so that it doesn't play if you are attempting to view offline. So, by popular demand I went ahead and updated the previous Google Video Getter greasemoney script. It now fixes the display error caused by Google's slight redesign of the Google Video inerface. See the previous post for installation instructions. The image below shows what this script does... it displays a link to download the Flash Video file form Google Video. You will need to rename the file with a .flv extension and view in a Flash Video compatible player.

A while back I wrote a Greasemonkey script to add a download link for the videos hosted at Google Video and posted it here on my blog. Recently its started to pick up a lot of attention, mostly because it was on the front of Digg.com for a day or so. Since then, Google Video has added a few new features: 1. Google Video has added some navigation at the top right of the screen that covers up the download link created by the greasemonkey script. Its easy to change in the script since its only about 10 lines of code. Just change the inline CSS and place the box somewhere else on the screen. 2. The greasemonkey script is now irrelevant anyway because Google Video now indludes download links for all free videos. There are also downloads in multiple formats specific to the video iPod and Sony PSP. Here's a screenshot: 3. Google Video now offers some downloads for purchase, including NBA games, old TV shows, and music videos. This will be interesting to see how it grows over time. Glad to see that they are improving their service.

Update: I do not provide support for scripts. The Google Video Getter script is now obsolete as Google Video recently added download links for all free videos. They also include downloadable videos that can be purchased in their video store. -- Jan. 10, 2006 Update #2: Due to popular demand I updated the Google Video Getter script. It now displays properly on the webpage. I'm told the script is not yet obsolete because Google Video downloads in a format that can only play/stream in a Google Video player. Of course the Flash Video only plays in a player capable of playing Flash Video, but at least you can view offline and convert to other formats. Enjoy! -- Jan. 17, 2006 Update #3: I've had to update this script yet again as the Google Video service keeps changing. They now use javascript to load the Flash embed code. Not to worry, simple work around... -- Mar. 3, 2006 One of the frustrating things about websites that use Flash video is that they rarely provide links to let you download the video files for offline viewing or transcoding/syncing to portable devices like the Sony PSP, video iPod, or Creative Zen Vision. Case and point: Google Video and YouTube. Neither of these websites allow you to download the video files. This type of lock-down is soooo Web 1.0. I decided to dive into Greasemonkey and create a couple scripts to expose download links on Google Video and YouTube webpages: Google Video Getter YouTube To Me To install these scripts you will need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. After installing Greasemonkey, relaunch Firefox, then right-click the links above and select "Install User Script." Now whenever you browse to a Google Video or YouTube webpage, you will see a prominent download link at the top. Welcome to Web 2.0 where the user is in control of the experience. See the screenshots below to see what these scripts do...

I just got back from SXSW in Austin, TX. I had a great time and met a lot of great people. I also got to hang out with a lot of people the I know from the interweb but don't get to see very often, like Steve Garfield. On Mon. night we went to the Red Eyed Fly bar in Austin for an event called Fray Cafe. I didn't know about Fray before, but its a website with a rich history. It was one of the earliest blogs before "blog" was a word, and it featured original, personal stories submitted by people around the world. Its still going, and each year at SXSW they do a live open-mic event where people tell their own stories. It was a lot of fun. Steve ended up telling a story about the first time he saw Elvis Costello in 1977 ("My Aim Is True" tour), but he had originally intended to tell a story about FireAnt.

This video is illegal. YouTube received a take-down notice from NBC regarding the SNL Lazy Sunday video. That was sure a long time coming. Here's what YouTube says on their blog: NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website. This response from YouTube must be firmly tongue-in-cheek. They "respect the rights of copyright holders"?! Give me a break. There's tons of infringing content all over YouTube. There's no way they could possibly plead ignorance here (they even hired the brother of one of the SNL sketch writers to be their "director of community" soon after they struck gold with this clip)... its clear that the video was infringing from the moment it was posted onto the site. Its an entire clip from SNL, not an excerpt, and certainly not fair use. Its got an NBC watermark on it. At what point was YouTube given permission to re-broadcast this video to millions of viewers through their website? Its not like this was file sharing amongst a few friends, this was re-broadcasted on a video portal site to millions of viewers. This is like CBS recording Saturday Night Live and then airing it the next day... and everyday after that for weeks. YouTube quite obviously benefits from video plaigarism of this sort all the time... but then again they're not alone. This clip was all over the internet. It was also on CollegeHumor.com, and yanked from there by Google Video (obvious from the CollegeHumor watermark, so its a copy of a copy on Google). It was probably on several other video hosting sites and portals (there's a lot of them out there now), as well as on several personal websites. NBC later released the clip as a free download on iTunes (its now $1.99), and they offer it for free viewing on their website (only for PC users with Internet Explorer). So, I decided to cherry pick... why not, everyone else is doing it. I downloaded this version of Lazy Sunday from Google Video, which was taken from CollegeHumor, and now I'm re-broadcasting it. If NBC sends me a notice I'll happily take down the clip. Of course, some people think that YouTube should be congratulated for their copyright infringing practices. Here's what Xeni Jardin says about it on BoingBoing: This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere Sorry, Xeni, that's completely wrong. In the same blog entry where YouTube responds to the take-down notice they also say: YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month So how exactly are they different from a TV network? How are they exempt from the laws and standard practices of the industry?

I met up with Irina Slutsky, the intrepid Bubble 2.0 spelunker for Geek Entertainment TV, and Schlomo Rabinowitz. While we were driving home, Irina's car overheated. We walked to a nearby gas station to grab a quart of oil and do a quick refill. Luckily it wasn't serious and we were able to drive home afterwards. Now that's entertainment!

Click here for video. [ QuickTime ]

Click here for video. [ QuickTime ]

Click here for video. [ QuickTime ]

Click here for video. [ QuickTime ]

Takada2.qt (video/quicktime Object) i found this, its cool.

I usually use this blog only for personal stuff, but figured I'd link to a few recent interviews I've done... Taylor Barcroft interviewed me at a Cinemar event in Santa Cruz, CA. Gabe Mac of XOLO.TV interviewed me in Central Park, NYC.

Ryanne, Jay, Daniel, and others said Hello from Vlog Europe in Amsterdam. Doug and I send greetings back from San Francisco.

Howard Rheingold on a lunch break at Foo Camp.

Street light at 148th and Amsterdam... someone call 311.

Ethan and Elijah encounter a moose while hiking in Utah. Lauren sent me this on a DVD she created using iMovie and iDVD. The music at the beginning and end is from Tom Petty's Wild Flowers. Buy this CD at Amazon.com

Last week I attended a Channel 102 screening at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater in NYC. After the show, I interviewed Will Hines and Tony Carnevale, the creators of Channel 102. If you haven't seen Channel 102, here's a few series that I recommend: Shutterbugs Cat News The Fun Squad

On the first day of our drive to Salt Lake City, we busted a tire on the U-Haul about 40 miles east of Pittsburgh on I-76. We ended up waiting all day in a rest stop parking lot for a U-Haul service person to arrive to fix the tire -- which took about 20 minutes once the guy showed up. While waiting, Ethan taught us to play "shit head." If anyone out there knows this game, or knows why its named "shit head," please let me know. I suck at card games.

My sister and her family are moving to Salt Lake City, UT. So, I helped my brother-in-law, Ethan drive their U-Haul truck and 2 other cars cross-country. Ethan drove the truck towing one car, and then my sister's friend, Peggy, and I followed behind in the other car. On Monday, June 27, we actually drove through a Tornado in western Nebraska. We were roughly 40 miles east of the Wyoming border on Intersate 80.

My cousin, Marc, describes his Home Netowrk powered by Xlobby.

A few weeks ago, Yury Gitman and I visited these piers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Yury shot this video on his little Xacti MPEG-4 camera. Soon after we shot this it began to rain incredubly hard. We ended up getting drenched, and then later went to Yury's girlfriend, Olia's house in Williamsburg to eat Sushi. On our way to Olia's, it stopped raining and we witnessed the most incredible rainbow I've ever seen. Adam Quirk captured that very same rainbow in this videoblog entry.