silent night

Our last episode was about bad experiences with iMovie and frustration with the state of licenses for movie soundtracks. I left on a high, though unlicensed, note and told you about my happy times with the python program 'webkit2png'.

It would have been a fine post with which to end the year if I had included an example. I couldn't figure out how to include the video I made in the course of writing that post and still preserve my anonymity.

I'm back with a new example that pinpoints my location as the northern hemisphere of Earth. I'm comfortable with that.

'Silent Night' was built from 251 ten second exposures taken at one minute intervals on Christmas Eve. The images were post-processed and stacked in webkit with an HTML canvas and getImageData/putImageData.

The sound track 'Silent Night' was licensed from friendlymusic.com for $1.99. That fee got me the rights to include the thirty second track in exactly one personal video uploaded to a 'User Generated Content' web site. My theory is that Google Drive is a 'User Generated Content' web site and that my hosting the file there is within the scope of my license.

Google Drive allowed direct access to the video for a few hours last night. That's what I wanted. This morning, Google gives me a fat HTTP 403. Perhaps this has something to do with copyright police. You ought to be able to get the full video from Google with this direct link. If your browser is a modern one, you ought to be able to skip the wonky flash player and just view the file directly below:


Merry Christmas.