One year after the city started providing video of Council, Planning Commission, and BAR meetings, they’ve expanded their offerings. They used to offer only Windows Media Player embedded video, which is the very worst way to do it. (But far, far better than nothing.) Now two more formats are offered: MP4 (Quicktime) video and MP3s of the audio. The MP4s can be put straight on an iPod, loaded into iMovie for editing, uploaded to YouTube and otherwise remixed and repurposed, and the MP3s are as portable and flexible as audio can be. This is the raw material that will help citizen media continue to evolve and improve in Charlottesville.
I’ve been puzzled at the accolades that the city has received for their technological offerings, because they so often choose the lesser of available solutions. But this? This is great.
Yeah, that’s nice as far as technology goes. But let’s talk about “programming” for a sec. Where are those cool shows like Inside Charlottesville and Talk of C’ville that the great Maurice Jones used to crank out with his crack staff? Are there any new shows in the works? Hmm…guess not. Was that too time consuming and expensive an endeavor? How about some reruns then?
I noticed the additional formats this week and also approve. It’s spending tax payer’s money to provide better access to unadulterated information.
Those spin shows mentioned above were a total waste of tax payer’s money and I’m glad to see them go. Why should I pay to have someone tell me how wise Council or Gary O’Connell is? Let them pay for their own campaign advertisement or lobbying for an automatic yearly raise. I prefer the animal shows.
This is very nice news indeed. And since I’m quite a geek head, I’ll go ahead and give some references to those. mp4 is the container format for MPEG 4. Specifically MPEG 4, part 14. See this article for more on that. And of course we all know what mp3’s are. So the mp4’s aren’t just quicktime files, they are a standard that many media players can handle on many platforms. They just happen to have been derived from quicktime like a few other parts of MPEG 4. Most importantly, it’s what all the cool kids use. :-)