Dailymotion tries to solve problems instead of complaining: brings video to the OLPC laptop
Written on September 6, 2008 – 2:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
THe OLPC laptop, developed for people from third-world countries, isn’t very popular in the blogosphere. Despite it’s noble goal, bloggers hate the facts that the development goes so slow and that its price is still higher than $100. Apart from some funny news - people paying €500 for a graffiti version -, there’s hardly any positive news surrounding the green laptop.
Well, there is now. Paris-based video service Dailymotion has decided to take on another problem of the OLPC. The $100 laptop is unfortunately not compatible with the Adobe Flash player that Dailymotion and other video sharing sites rely on. So the enormous video site has decided to start a project which will make a large amount of videos accessible for people browsing on the OLPC computer.
The project consists of a special group where users can upload videos that are in fact compatible with the toylike-looking laptop. These videos are encoded in free standards, provided by the Xiph.Org Foundation: Ogg (container), Vorbis (audio) and Theora (compression).
Although Flash-compatibility would be the ultimate solution - like they say on ReadWriteWeb: “that’s just how it goes” - I like the fact Dailymotion is actually doing something to turn the OLPC laptop in a success. Because a project with such an ambitious and world-improving goal can use some respect. So that, in a while, (flash-based) videos of people kicking around with the laptop (believe it or not, there’s actually a man who did such a pathetic thing) will become absolutely intolerable and unheard of.
I hope you like that post!
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adobe flash, Adobe Flash Player, dailymotion, OLPC, One Laptop per Child, Theora, Vorbis, Xiph.Org Foundation
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