Drumbeat/webmademovies/nfb

The General Idea

The NFB wants to explore the possibilities of HTML5, particularly around educational content. Mozilla wants to work with content creators and their developers to advance the popcorn.js library, and to see it adopted “in the wild”

ZeroDivide and Mozilla will enter a partnership to:

Prototype tools and page layouts to serve NFB content in HTML5 across multiple browsers and devices
Create ways for educational audiences to add their own semantic content to educational titles, and ways for NFB to manage this additional content

The NFB will gain an ability to enrich their educational titles in a manner that can be used as template for any films in the future, an opportunity for their developers to work on cutting edge technology with an industry leader, and a way to engage with audiences in a collaborative manner.

Mozilla will gain tools and materials to make it easier for more people to use the Web Made Movies technology, a large community of new users for open video, and a great relationship with the NFB that can lead to new and interesting opportunities.

Working Method

Web Made Movies is an open-source project – a core team develops software in conjunction with volunteers, augmented by external developers who have an interest in seeing the library (or libraries) develop new features.

In our partnership, NFB developers would interface with our process – downloading versions of the source code, using version control software, filing bugs and taking tickets, and participating in weekly calls and IRC meetings.

In addition (or potentially instead of above), Mozilla and NFB will commit funds to hire external developers and designers as needed to complete production-ready implementations of HTML5 video pages.

Stages

Step 1: Drafting requirements

What do we want NFB pages to do / look like?
What features would we like added to popcorn.js video library?
What development will be required that is unique to this partnership, ie not destined for any library?

Step 2: Resource gathering

identify how NFB currently delivers video
examine popcorn.js library

Step 3: Prototyping

Creating wireframes for pages
Creating demos and reference implementations of programming

Step 4: Production

Building cross-platform HTML5 pages
Serving video in multple formats, ie MP4, OGG, WebM, Flash
Allowing users to add semantic data