Remixing News Video On The Fly

slashdotbs writes "The New York Times writes that 'A handful of Web users are programming their own virtual TV newscasts and eclectic collections of video clips using a free media-sharing tool called Webjay. The site makes it easy to build, share and watch playlists of audio and video links culled from around the Internet.' Although the site was originally intended to be used for audio playlist creation, it turns out that it can also be used effectively for video. In addition, you can create "video mashups", where you blend audio and video together to present a new message. By using simple smil commands in a URL, a CBS news report can become a short clip of George Bush saying "I can't do my job" (the third track on this playlist)."

Comments

Buffering issue

[toetagger1]

I'm trying to watch some of those video playlists. Unfortunately, there is always this buffer time between videos. It would be a lot more enjoyable if it started buffering the next video while it showes the current one. Also, every time the clip changes, the player popos into the forgound, which is also annoying. Nontheless, a very neat way to epxress some ideas!

RTFA

[SuperBanana]

This has already been done a lot in music. A lot of /.'ers might remember the DJ Dangermouse "Grey Album", which mashed Jay-Z's Black Album with The Beatles White Album.

RTFA. The site doesn't have the clips, it has metainfo files which contain references to audio and video segments.

If Dangermouse had simply provided a script for an audio mixing program, he wouldn't have gotten in the least bit of trouble. Furthermore, Dangermouse's Grey album became the online equivalent of a best-seller, skyrocketing in popularity when people found out the music companies were dead against it and trying to remove it.

mod parent down to hell

[Bold Marauder]

apparently google news no longer provides courtesy links.

Off to -1 land for me again. :(

Been done before

[LeahofRivendell]

By using simple smil commands in a URL, a CBS news report can become a short clip of George Bush saying "I can't do my job" (the third track on this playlist)
There's a funnier version of this at http://www.ebaumsworld.com/presaddress2.shtml
Unfair editing is a concept as old as speaking.

Finally, Douglas Engelbart's vision

[michaelmalak]

Douglas Engelbart, who prototyped the web hardware (including mouse) in 1966, started bootstrap.org in 1988 to pursue his vision of deep contextual hyperlinks:

The [Open Hyperdocument System]'s initial design specifications are a result of 50 years of innovation and experimentation by Doug Engelbart and his team of researchers among a variety of user communities, including aerospace and software development. These requirements include fine-grained addressability of all types of documents and support for multiple ways of viewing and manipulating them. Some of these features have found their way into existing tools, such as the World Wide Web, while others are currently being explored. The purpose of the OHS is to serve as a standard framework for these features, so that different applications may interoperate with the DKR and with each other.

As with the mouse, it seems someone else is going to popularize fine-grained hyperlinks.

a better example of news remixing

[lucas_gonze]

Speaking as the author of webjay here:

On a technical level, what's original is that the remixing all happens on the client side. It's a *client side remix*, which is a new thing.

Check out this playlist for a fancier set of techniques, including clipping, multiple audio and video sources at the same time, and a good playlist in general. When you watch that the thing to realize is that the soundtrack is coming from one place, the picture from another, the video from another, and all of that is getting mashed together on *your* machine.