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EngageMedia is happy to announce the release of a new report into Free and Open Source Software video codecs. It is a review of available tools for the creation, playback and embedding of online video using FOSS codecs, and a look at the most pressing areas for development to enhance their adoption by social change video projects on the web.

The Portuguese translation of the Audio/Video NGO-in-a-box, co-produced by EngageMedia and Tactical Tech, has just been released online. The Audio/Video box is a collection of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for multimedia production and distribution. The Audio/Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box is a toolkit that lowers the entry level for NGOs, non-profits and media activists wanting to use audio and video for social change.

EngageMedia will be running a workshop about online video distribution at this years Making Links conference in Sydney, October 30-31. If you are interested in finding out how to compress your video, get your content online and get it out there make sure you come along.

There are a range of spaces online to find out information about the current uprising in Burma, in particular video content which in previous times would have been hard to access. The following is a list of such web spaces.

September: As part of ANAT's "Still Open" workshops EngageMedia programmer Andy Nicholson will be speaking in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane at a series of free public lectures along with Alessandro Ludovico and Beatriz da Costa.

EngageMedia is looking for video makers going to the APEC summit in Sydney this week. We want to cover a range of angles on the site from those challenging APEC's neoliberal agenda. If you are planning on being there, are looking for other video makers, or have content to contribute then let us know.

EngageMedia are happy to announce Ogg Theora to Flash transcoding is live on the website. What does that mean?? Ogg Theora is a high quality FOSS (Free Open Source Software) video codec developed by Xiph.org. It means that now you can make an Ogg file of your video and when you upload it you'll be able to watch a transcoded (or converted) version of this in the EngageMedia embedded Flash Player - just as you would with any other video format. At EngageMedia we try to encourage the use of free software wherever possible. As far as video codecs like Quicktime, Windows Media and Flash are concerned, these are proprietary codecs that can cost huge amounts of money for online distributors to use, depending on the license and how these videos are delivered to the web audience. We encourage the use of FOSS codecs where possible, and are hoping to increase their usability and uptake.

On Saturday 4th of August 2007, EngageMedia conducted a workshop on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) at the Media Resource Centre in Adelaide.

We've just added a new tutorial on how to create Ogg Theora/Vorbis files to upload to EngageMedia, using the new Simple Theora Encoder from v2v. Check this out to see how you can generate video files made with free open source video codecs on your Mac running OS X.