Free Software (made with free software) - Computerphile

Why the Free Software Foundation say iTunes isn't free software. Matt Lee, Technical Lead at Creative Commons explains.

This film was produced (almost) entirely with free software. The exception is that I transcoded the original footage to an easier to handle format before I started. The project has taken a week & involved me trying no less than five distros, several types of video editing software and spending hours waiting for renders which most of the time failed. I found a way of working which still took five hours to export from the editing software, in pieces, it was then pieced together by mkvmerge and uploaded.

There are some production issues with this film, such as glitchy audio and some harsh cuts, but they are partly down to my inexperience with the specific editing software and lack of patience and not necessarily purely to the software itself.

Thanks for reading this footnote - next step is to pull together a film on how I made this one! Sean

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[nickhill]

As a computer user I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the free software movement for the tireless efforts to counter regulatory capture by powerful software vendors. Which if unchecked would have given us a closed internet littered with toll booths.

[ringpolitiet]

There are no excuses for leaving a video with faulty audio up. Take it down, fix, reupload. The Brady channels have a good reputation. Don't soil it, especially not with excuses about you not knowing how to use the programs you chose to use in the production of the video. Also, this was the best location you could find for an interview? Really?

[Billy]

I find it ironic that this video is promoting free software (something I'm totally in support of, by the way), but only makes it look bad via the crackling audio.

[noahshrewsbery]

The one thing I don't understand is how, with free software, anyone could make a profit. I couldn't care less about Apple or Adobe's profits, but there are countless small-time developers who have no money apart from selling their indie games or applications. If everything was free software, meaning that anyone can do what they want with it, what's to keep everyone from pirating and leaving them with nothing?

[BlueishBefore]

I will probably end up pointing people to this video when I need to quickly explain what I mean by 'free' software, good job!

[TheWhitePianoKeyProductions]

I'm sure you could fix the noise after with audacity?

[otakuribo]

Big thumbs-up for supporting free software; especially Ubuntu, Inkscape, and GIMP (all of which I use and love <3 ).

Unfortunately I am not a video editing expert, but one of the (many) great things about free software is that there is a huge online comunity that publish tutorials and wikis and are generally very eager to help you. I'll let the rest of the comments box handle that one.

[jwt]

At least you picked a cool background to film this; that overpass and traffic really add to the shot's composition.

[joelproko]

Wow, the audio was really bad. Had to put it into audacity, run several filters over it hoping that woul help (which it did, to some extent; no more ear-hurting crackling) and then ran the video muted and timed starting the audio in audacity to match up with the video. Luckily, got the timing perfect on just the 4th try and was able to enjoy the video.

For those wondering, I believe the most effective filter was the compressor with the knee point at default volume and with maximum flat slope (1:32 iirc), including peaks (very important), applied twice. I also used an equalizer to radically cut off the top fourth or fifth of the frequency band. I tried the noise remover and the klick-filter (twice), but am unsure whether they actually did anything. In any case, person stayed intelligible while the audio no longer sounded as if it'd grab my ear's cochlea's hair cells and break them in two.

[eideticex]

The best thing about free software is that you can adapt it to work even in situations it wasn't designed to work. This has allowed me to compile a lot of my favorite Linux software to run on my phone with just one copy paste for a line that initializes Android's touchpad emulation mode. Qt and Gtk run pretty good in Android but you have to make sure you set the manifest to make them persistent or they will crash a lot, memory use is very minimal.

Will be going to Radio Shack nearby in a couple days, sale on an open hardware platform we all love for it's versatility and open logic chips. The chips are pretty popular ones, probably have a bunch of their smaller variants in every computerized device you own including your car. You can make your own clones and sell them as long as you don't use their name and they give you most of what you need to know to do that on a small slip of paper with the chips.

Free software and open hardware is how things get done by people that aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. I hate how proprietary bottle machines are at work. They all jack into a serial modem which can control every function but if we tamper with the stuff, they will refuse servicing the machines or selling any more to the store. That's crazy to me, I don't even try to comprehend it. Your machines crush cans with mechanical systems, there's no secret to protect there, anyone could look inside if they asked to see it and it wasn't too busy. Not like we can all make those things that well, that should be plenty of justification for the high cost, not an enforced blackout of information.

[craigshelley]

Thank you for the video. Moving over to a new platform is never easy. At first there appears to be so many tools, but nothing that does exactly what you want. It also often requires a totally different way of thinking to what you may have previously been used to, and the learning curves are initially a lot steeper with many of the free software tools. In time though you get an established work-flow, and through the use of command line tools for the pre and post processing, you end up with a collection of scripts to automate many of the tasks.
Codec support is one major issue that still plagues many of the open source editors. This is often nothing to do with the capability of the software, but often due to patent issues preventing vendors from building or distributing certain codecs. This issue alone can turn, what should be a straight forward process of opening a file, into a process that involves transcoding and various other conversion processes.
Also, I find that getting good results in a free video editing software environment requires a quite a broad understanding of video coding techniques. Concepts such as de-interlacing, field order, colourspace, chroma sub-sampling, pixel format, are all things that I didn't really pay much attention to until I started to edit video using entirely free software. Some proprietary video editing packages are able to do a very good job of working with these issues, to the point where you don't even need to be aware of them. So the free software world still has a long way to go, but there are many projects that are alive and are at a healthy pace of development.
Never give up, it's very rewarding when you get it to work.

[DanaLeeGibson]

Love it!!
Been using a Mac (professionally) since 1995. Got into Linux and free software because Adobe is getting outrageous. I still have a Mac but I also have a laptop and older DELL desktop running Linux (SolydK) and GIMP. 
Windows does not equal PC, back in a day a PC was a machine and you had a wide choice of ways to run it.

[smjpl]

Happy to watch the free version of this video. I can easily live with some glitches during the early stages of introducing new software.

[ddck]

Do you really expect me to continue the development of gimp for example if the developers of gimp suddenly decide to discontinue the development? With free software, i as a user, am equally dependent on the developers of the software as i would be with closed software like Adobe with it's Fireworks software for example.
If they decide to stop developing it, i have to live with it. Free software or not.

[OOZ]

While I appreciate the effort that went into this video, if I were in the creator's shoes I don't think I'd have released it. It inadvertently does a great job being its own counterpoint.

[Seegalgalguntijak]

I don't do video editing, but on my PCs, I use basically >90% free software. I went away from Windows 2000 in 2006 and started using Linux, first Kubuntu 6.10, then Debian (Etch, then Lenny) until 2009 and then Ubuntu again, now since 2012 I use Linux Mint, because I like the Cinnamon desktop environment. So the only non-free software I can currently think of on my machines is the Flash plugin. Unfortunately, that isn't true for my mobile phone (running Android). There's so much non-free stuff in Android, and even if I had flashed my phone with a custom firmware, to get the full use out of it I'd need the Google services framework, which again presses me back into having to rely on non-free software :-(

[wingbull]

It feels like my headphones are nibbling on my right ear. Stop it! Aaaggghhh!

[MrNomnomking]

I switched to linux early last year. At first I thought I would have a ton of trouble getting used to new software, but it was all really easy to learn. Different, but about the same learning curve as anything on windows or Mac. Currently I run Antergos, and if anyone wants to try out a nice simple distro that will let you do more as your knowledge of linux  grows, I would reccomend it.

[kbabioch]

Thanks for the video, always good to have the word about FLOSS spread.

[szymontoda]

Why I dont use free software (mostly): "The exception is that I transcoded the original footage to an easier to handle format before I started. The project has taken a week & involved me trying no less than five distros, several types of video editing software and spending hours waiting for renders which most of the time failed. I found a way of working which still took five hours to export from the editing software, in pieces, it was then pieced together by mkvmerge and uploaded."