This year’s OVC will include an Open Media Developers conference track, convening a group of coders, engineers, and standards advocates working toward a more open video ecosystem.

If not for FFMpeg, VLC, Xiph, Blender, GStreamer and similar projects, publishing audio and video would be much more expensive, restrictive, and difficult.  Developers of these and other open source projects are building the foundations for our essential communications infrastructure.

Combine these foundational open video technologies with the recent developments in HTML5 & WebM, and video is poised to become a “first-class citizen” of the web. Browsers are within striking distance of offering limitless publication and distribution possibilities for audio and video content—a revolution of enormous scale, if you consider what’s been made possible by ordinary web pages with text and images.

The Open Video Conference is about building a future in which anyone can make and share video—and we are fortunate this year to convene the Open Media Developers working group for the architects of this future.

Previously, the Open Video Conference was host to the FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software) developer workshop in the days following the main event. This year, the organizers of FOMS and OVC have decided to make this workshop a core part of the conference. The Open Media Developers track is comprised of the following sessions, all focused on developing next-generation video technologies:

• WebRTC: Realtime Communications and HTML5
• Standards for Video Accessibility
• WebM: Testing, Metrics and New features
• HTML5 video players: Shortcomings of the HTML5 video API for cross-platform player libraries
• Standards for HTTP Adaptive Streaming
• Standards for Browser Video Statistics
• Device Inputs for A/V in the Browser

In addition to these sessions, we’ll be very flexible on making more sessions and smaller breakouts to focus on particularly difficult challenges. And of course there will be time for coding, since we know that progress is only made when actual code is written.

If you are a developer in the space, we would really like to encourage you to join us. Travel support is available—please write conference@openvideoalliance.org and let us know what you’re working on in the open media landscape.

Tags: FOMS, Open Media Developers, Open Media Software, Technology