Help and Tutorials

This page gives you some brief tutorials on what you can do on this site and how to publish video. If you have any questions please contact us.

CONTENTS

• Guide to Digital Video Distribution
• What You Can Do
• Watching Video
• Downloading Video
• Uploading Video
• Open Content Licensing
• Compressing Video
• Tutorials

GUIDE TO DIGITAL VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

What you can do on EngageMedia

• Upload videos via a publishing web form. These videos will be automatically available for download as a BitTorrent file. Video uploading functionality will be developing as we go forward, allowing for large video files to be uploaded through the web, java applets and ftp plus automatic transcoding to standard video formats.
• You can assign a creative commons license to your video work.
• Vodcasting - generate a video feed which you can then import into a client such as ITunes or DTV which will automatically download new videos to your computer when a new video is updated. You could subscribe to the Latest Videos feed or to a specific Member's video feed, or pick your feed by Topic or Country.
• You'll notice in your members area that you have three folders, videos, news and events. You can add more folders, files and pages here and generally use this space as your workspace. We don't want EngageMedia just to be a place where you upload and download video but where you communicate and organise.
  
• Create a profile page about you and your video work which includes a listing of your video contributions to EngageMedia. Edit this page.
• Post an Event about a screening, workshop or festival.
• Post a News item about a film you have in production, developments in the world of video activism, tactical media or the new participatory culture breeding on the Internet.
  
• Contact other Members of EngageMedia to discuss collaborations or just to say hello.
  
• Comment on videos after you've watched them. Please try to be constructive at all times and consider your comments before pressing Save. :)
  
• Create a list of favorite videos, video makers or pages by clicking on the love heart on each page. You can see a list of your favorites on your profile page and change them in your favorites folder in your workspace.
• Easily add links to your del.icio.us account by clicking on the del.icio.us icon.
• Send someone an email about a page you want them to see by clicking the letter icon in the top right.
  

Watching video from EngageMedia

We encourage people to download video from EngageMedia and share it with others. We believe that the Internet is a great distribution tool, but so are community screenings, re-distributing on DVD or VCD and simply copying stuff for your friends. If you download a video you can watch it as many times as you want but only had to use that bandwidth once. Another advantage is that you can keep the Torrent file open and share the file with other users. Or copy the file to your portable media device for playback on the go.

Most computers come with a video player such as Quicktime, iTunes or Windows Media Player that allow you to watch video on your computer, and even watch it fullscreen as if it was television. These players generally work well, playing back many types of video. However, we recommend you use VideoLAN Client as it is will play back more formats and codecs than any other player, is more secure and is also free software. For Linux another good product is MPlayer.

If your player application won't play back the video you have downloaded, it might need to access the Internet to install a "codec". This is a little piece of software that will allow your player to decode the video and audio information. Rather than bothering, we recommend simply downloading and installing VideoLAN Client (VLC) and consulting its documentation.

You might also want to check out tools such as DTV or Fire Ant which allow you to subscribe to Video Podcasts or "Vodcasts".

How to download video

There are two different ways to download video to your computer. One is by a normal web download using your browser. To do this just right click on the download link and select "save to disk". You will be able to find the video file wherever you have set up your browser to download files. Then just open it up in VLC (see above).

The other way is via BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a Peer2Peer file-sharing program that is great for downloading things such as large video files. It shares the load of downloading amongst a network of peers rather than through one single large and costly and potentially slow server. To download via BitTorrent you simply need to download the program and install it on your computer. You can also use other BitTorrent programs such as Azureus which provide you with a few more options to configure your downloads.

How to upload video

Uploading video is as simple as following the instructions on the publish form.

Make sure you fill in all the required fields, and try to fill out as many of the non-required fields as possible in order to populate our database with useful metadata and help others access useful information about you and your video. This will be the basis of a collaborative network of Members and video productions. If you are uploading a large video it will take some time so please be patient. You'll need to have a decent broadband net connection to upload video. If you don't have this at home, try using a connection somewhere else like at work, at a friend's house or the offices of your campaign group.

OPEN CONTENT LICENSING

EngageMedia now offers a range of open content licensing options so you can choose to what extent you wish to make your video available for others to share and re-use.

The default license for content on EngageMedia is a Creative Commons license allowing anyone to copy, distribute and transmit your work but only for non-commercial purposes. Derivative works (allowing others to remix or re-edit your work, or using portions of it in their own work) is not allowed by default.

Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

However you have much more choice over the license you wish to attach to your work. You can choose between two different open content licensing schemes - Creative Commons, GNU Free Document License - or attach a custom license of your own. In addition there are a few different choices you can make when choosing a Creative Commons license to tailor it to your needs.

• Creative Commons - more info here
• GNU Free Document License - more info here
• Custom License - more info about open content licensing in general here

How to compress video

Compressing video for the web can be a fine art but it can also be relatively simple. EngageMedia automatically creates a small version of your video to view online, so it's a good idea to create a file that a film festival or a community TV station could download and screen.

For encoding your video we recommend using ffmpegx for mac, Virtual Dub or MediaCoder for Windows and Gtranscode or ffmpeg2theora for Linux. These programs cost nothing to use though you can donate to assist their development. You can also use a range of proprietary video-encoding applications such as Quicktime Pro, ProCoder or Cleaner or even encode the video straight from the timeline in Final Cut Pro, Vegas Video or Premiere.

The following are our two main recommendations for encoding video, we do however accept almost all formats and many codecs. Others you might want to try are MPEG4, H.264, MPEG2, MPEG1, and DivX.

Encoding for Screening Quality - xVid

VIDEO
Codec: xVid
Format: .avi
Video Size: 320x240
Data Rate 1200 kbits/second
Framerate: 25 frames/sec (native PAL)
Fields: progressive (de-interlaced)

AUDIO
Codec: mp3
Sample rate: 48000
Data Rate: 128 kbits/second

Encoding for Screening Quality - Ogg Theora

AUDIO
Codec: Vorbis
Sample rate: 48000
Data Rate: 128 kbits/second

see Tutorial for how to make an Ogg Theora

Tutorials

How To Encode an Ogg Theora Video Using SimpleTheoraEncoder on Intel MAC

REQUIRMENTS
Intel Macintosh OS 10.4 or higher

1. Download SimpleTheoraEncoder from here:
http://v2v.cc/~j/SimpleTheoraEncoder/Simple%20Theora%20Encoder.dmg

2. Open the disk image by double-clicking on the .dmg file you have downloaded in the Finder window:

3. Drag and drop the Simple Theora Encoder application into your Applications folder:

4. Navigate to your Applications folder and double-click on SimpleTheoraEncoder to open the application.

5. Add your video files by clicking Add:

6. Navigate to the video files you wish to encode, select them and click OK. You can add as many files as you wish to encode all at once:

7. Click encode:

8. Wait for all your files to be encoded:

9. Open your videos in VLC to play them and check they are OK. (Note if you do not have VLC you can download it here)

Let your friends know they should download VLC to watch your videos. VLC can play just about any kind of video, it is free of cost, and free software so it's a great application for anyone who watches video on their computer to have. It is cross-platform so it works on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.