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Royalty Free AV Data for Benchmarking?
Foredecker asks: "I'm developing some audio and video encoding benchmarks. (yes, they will be open source), and I need royalty free high quality audio and video. Unfortunately, I can't simply rip CD's and DVD's for distribution. I need to distribute the content with the benchmark to provide a consistent data set. I'd like both stereo and 5:1 audio and regular and high-def video. Anyone have any ideas where I can get such content?"
All over the U.S. aspiring young "film people" make all kinds of cute little shorts. They would love the exposure; most would be glad to release under the GPL, or GDL, or whatever public license you want.
If you need some good cartoon footage I saw a link to a short with a little rodent scurrying about the house in a translucent ball around here somewhere....
Try going to the forums area of www.CGTalk.com and ask over there. It's a website dedicated to computer generated art and animation. There are lots of professionals there who work at tv/movie/game studios. I imagine you'd be able to find people willing to donate what you need. (or at least put you in touch with somebody who might)
;)
It's worth a shot.
"Derp de derp."
What about, Archive.org -- they seem to have a large selection of Public domain videos, who knows if they are any recent ones though..
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
working in a video/image compression lab, we always ran into that problem of not finding GOOD source that hasn't been messed around with or other artifacts.
our solution to getting Hi-Def material? Sony's HD-CAM a little pricey, but damn, even george used it for a movie.
you just can't go wrong here.
Plz tell me where I can download "THE MATRIX RELOADED". K. THX.
PS - I'm writing open source video and want to use it to benchmark
You didn't say whether you meant technical quality or content quality. If you just need technical quality, you can hire a freelancer to shoot you some pretty stuff. It will cost something, but it may be a bargain compared to blowing a lot of time searching for free stuff.
If you're stuck for something to film, you can always shoot out of your car window or something similar. You don't need to hire actors.
This way, not only is there no ambiguity concerning copyrights, but you'll be able to get footage that matches exactly what you need out of the film. Want to benchmark scenes with different levels of motion and different types of motion? Just film that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
We've been collecting what freely-redistributable clips we can find at media.xiph.org. There's not much there, but it's still worth a look. Particularly interesting for your case are some public domain HD test clips made available by TU München LDV. Of course, they're quite short given the size of uncompressed HD frames.
Please let us know if you find anything else, that's exactly what the collection is for.
In general, the suggestions of contacting copyright holders for permission is the best one. There are various collections of test clips and movies online, but they're generally either small and without audio, or already compressed. Plus, the more content we get under free licenses, the better the world will be. :-)
The Internet Archive does have a collection of movies with contact information, so that might be an easy place to start.
Good luck!