News + MediaGoblin is Rad

We are getting really excited to show all the incredible animation and amazing render tests coming off the farm. And even though we don’t want to let *too* much slip before time, I know Bassam is planning an update with some teaser images and production notes pretty soon.

Today I’m happy to share news of MediaGoblin, a libre software “publishing system” for images, video, audio and more that friends of Bassam’s and mine are building. It’s a single replacement for Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, and similar that anyone can run (like WordPress), but federated to keep files under user control. It’s very extensible, with support just added for 3D models now suggesting an alternative to Thingiverse. But I’m especially excited about MediaGoblin because it will establish the core functionality we can use to implement a lot of cool ideas we’ve had during Tube production for a collaborative platform that also fills the huge need for a solid asset management pipeline, a kind of super-Helga with some interesting properties. We’ve been talking to a bunch of developers about putting together a free software project after Tube, in which there’s been a lot of interest, and I have a thought that we could get studios to pool resources instead of each rolling their own and occasionally making a dead-end free software release.

A few weeks ago at the Blender Conference, we were talking with the renderfarm.fi developers about how, together with their distributed rendering, and these fairly near-future pipeline/collab possibilities, it seems like a lot of big pieces falling into place. MediaGoblin is worthy in its primary goals, but of especial interest for providing much of the functionality we’d need, plus perks like federation that we’ve dreamed about. Coding with Will Kahn-Greene, formerly of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the project lead is Chris Webber, until recently a developer at Creative Commons, and also a Blender user who did the anim in the excellent Patent Absurdity doc. And as part of the Tube Open Movie, Chris helped build pipeline scripts as well as our Reference Desk tool, one of the programs inspiring the new asset branch in Blender.

Today MediaGoblin has a nice write-up at Libre Graphics World, concluding:

If you are concerned about having full control over images, videos and audio records that you put online, you have just a few days left to support development of MediaGoblin — an awesome free software project that decentralizes media storage. If you are a VFX or animation studio, or even a 3D printing company, you have even more reasons to support the project. With initial support for 3D models (STL and OBJ) MediaGoblin has a great chance to grow into a scalable digital asset management solution that is free to use and modify. Finally, if you are a developer who’s good at Python, MediaGoblin could do with your contributions.

** Donations are tax-deductible in the US and also support the Free Software Foundation, which hosts the campaign.

And thanks for anything you can do to help this awesome project by passing the word!