Metavid is a

free-software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribute it and any adapted ...

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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

. 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 States ...

. 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 television in the United States, cable and Satellite television in the United States, satellite television network, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a Non ...

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 el ...

floor footage. Originally metavid hosted house and senate committees but they were taken down in response to legal threats by C-SPAN. 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 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.

Metavid Software

Metavid is a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

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

ogg Ogg is a digital multimedia container format designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of digital multimedia. It is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation and is free and open, unrestricted by software patents. Its name is ...

video. The Metavid software is built on top of

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

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 Annodex is a digital media format developed by CSIRO to provide annotation and index (search engine), indexing of ''continuous media'', such as Sound, audio and video. It is based on the Ogg container format, with an XML language called Continuous ...

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

The Metavide MediaWiki extension has not been maintained since 2016.{{cite web , url=https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MetavidWiki , title=Extension:MetavidWiki , author= , date=February 9, 2016 , publisher=MediaWiki.org, accessdate=January 19, 2025

References

MediaWiki websites MediaWiki extensions Semantic wikis Semantic wiki software Internet properties established in 2006