[foms] Open Video Reference Build; hOCR & DjVu

[Andoni Morales]

2013/11/10 George Chriss <GChriss at openvideo.pro>

> Hi Silvia,
>
> Barring remote/virtual participation I'm afraid I won't be able to attend
> FOMS 2013.  But I do have two suggested topics that might add a lot to the
> overall discussion and direction of FOMS, summarized below.
>
> ======
> Open Video Reference Build
>  From https://gitorious.org/openvideo_reference_build/pages/Home :
>  "The 'Open Video Reference Build' project is a set of tools designed to
> facilitate working with 'open video' in multiple contexts such as
> software development, live-streaming, A/V conferencing, video editing,
> and machine recognition."
>
> Over the past few weeks I've been working on the above and I'm happy to be
> able to say that it's becoming a reasonably mature project.  That said,
> I've received limited feedback and FOMS seems like a good place to start.
>
> Hi George

This approach looks very similar to the build system we have created for
GStreamer 2 years ago. It's called "cerbero" and it currently builds the
whole GStreamer stack with around 100 dependencies. We use python instead
of bash with a very flexible system for creating recipes making it really
easy to add new projects for any kind of upstream build system (makefiles,
autotools, cmake, etc..) , and with several tools to manage the builds
similar to jhbuild (list, build, clean, buildone, info, shell, etc...)

We currently support the following platforms:
  * Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and others can be added easily)
  * OS X (multiarch)
  * Windows
  * Android
  * iOS

It has bootstrapping facilities to setup the whole build environment in all
the above platforms (toolchain, autotools, libtool, cmake, autoconf,
etc...) and also support creating native packages, very useful for
applications. We only have recipes for a few applications right now, but
adding support for Totem, Miro or Pidging should be straightforward.

It would be nice if we could join forces, because maintaining a build
system with that many dependencies is a huge amount of work and cerbero is
backed by the GStreamer community.

You can find some documentation on how to use it here:
http://docs.gstreamer.com/display/GstSDK/Building+from+source+using+Cerbero


Cheers,
Andoni




>
> ======
> hOCR & DjVu
>
> From the "text representation is multimedia too" line of thought I think
> it would be helpful to open a discussion on how the FOMS/Xiph community
> can help support the underpinnings of OCR compatibility and open,
> portable-document formats (i.e., PDF and DjVu) with relatively minimal
> effort.
>
> As best as I can tell the hOCR specification has been non-maintained for
> the past three years; the 'hocr-tools' project has been largely inactive
> for the past four.  The spec is elegant in that is is built entirely from
> HTML but there are unresolved ambiguities and a few underdeveloped
> sections.  It needs a new home...
>
> I've started the 'hocr-workflow-tools' project, making it possible to
> markup images with hOCR (via Inkscape) then export-all as a
> text-searchable PDF (via command-line or Inkscape):
>  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/hocr/CjeiE5MiqS8/iumxuSXNvRsJ
> (Think text-searchable handwriting.)
>
> I'd like to extend hocr-workflow-tools to produce DjVu files as well, as a
> separate effort.  DjVu is in a unique position: the patent license granted
> by LizardTech to the DjVu community only covers implementations of the
> current spec; innovation is disallowed.  My understanding is that
> LizardTech's key patents are expiring now or in the near future; it's a
> neat, high-quality "codec" also in need of adoption (possibly).  By
> contrast PDF is a proprietary specification provided by Adobe, even if
> "fair" via standardization ('PDF/A' is especially helpful).
>
> OCR inter-compatibility and portable-document formats are big deal for
> libraries and law offices, other organizations too.
>
>
> Sincerely,
> George
>
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>



-- 
Andoni Morales Alastruey

LongoMatch:The Digital Coach
http://www.longomatch.ylatuya.es
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