It has not been a simple task to arrive at this point. Filming, directing, encoding, planning, thinking.. All very difficult things to do. This page will attempt to give detailed explanations of various semicomplex.. things.

Nature

The films take place in the nature. That's it.

License, copyright

Copyright -- see Wikipedia's article for an explanation -- has reached a level where only a few people have that right. Looking at an ordinary film, a piece of music or even a computer program, it it often illegal to simply copy it. If a person has used up 5MB of their hard disk for a piece of music and then chooses to copy it, so that it takes up 5MB on a friend's hard disk, there's a high risk that person is doing something illegal, because if the music is covered by a heavy copyright (like a lot of films, music, books, etc. are), only the ones who reserve the right to copy it may copy it. This might work okay when the copyright holders only reinforce their right to copy a work in commercial contexts, but when they start to restrict ordinary people from simply sharing art, it's gone too far.

So..

"Niels' nature" episodes are free, in the sense that everybody is allowed to share them. As a bonus, everybody is also allowed to modify them and share their modifications, so that even more people can benefit. All this is made possible by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (also used by Wikipedia). Niels' nature' -- both the films and the textual content of the website -- is licensed under that license. For the license to work, there must be a copyright owner. This is because it's a copyleft license.

Copyright © 2008, 2009 Niels Serup
All text, pictures (except 'stop.svg' and 'stop.png', which are in the public domain) and films on this website are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

The image 'stop.svg' is taken from the Tango Desktop Project and slightly modified. Tango base icons are in the public domain, so nothing's stopping me from releasing my modified version under CC BY-SA. But I'll respect the project's ideology and not do that.

To attribute me, a link to this website ('http://nature.metanohi.org/') and a string with my name ('Niels Serup') is enough.

Note that this website uses a small amount of JavaScript code to make some things a bit fancier. You shouldn't attribute me when reusing code and HTML formatting from this website. I find it too trivial to have it require a real copyleft license; just copy it as you wish.

Contact

You can contact me at ns@metanohi.name.

OGG

"Niels' nature" episodes are encoded into the OGG format, using Theora for video and Vorbis for sound. OGG is a free video/sound/subtitle container format. Implementing OGG is easy, as its specification is freely available to everyone. It's also royalty-free.

You can read more about OGG in the manual published by FLOSS Manuals, either online or as a pdf.

"Why not just YouTube?"

YouTube still mainly uses H.264 for their videos. It may be that it is technically a good codec, but patent-wise it's a mess. That's why it's a good thing that YouTube is beginning to use WebM with VP8, as that is a free format. It is however still most common with Flash-based video players (instead of HTML5-based), and considering that Flash can only be perfectly run by the proprietary Adobe Flash, it's a problem. Gnash, a free Flash player, seems to be steadily solving this problem, but even if it eventually becomes capable of running Flash programs perfectly, the Flash programs may still not be free. And they should.

It seems that YouTube uses some non-trivial, non-free JavaScript as well as a non-free core only partly available through an API. This is a problem. YouTube also has ads, which is annoying. One's use of YouTube is in typical Google-way probably not very private (see http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy).

Read more about free software, the alternative to proprietary software, on gnu.org.

How to play the episodes

If you're using a fairly new browser, it should be possible to play the episodes inside your browser. They are embedded using the <video> tag of HTML5, which is supported in Firefox 3.5+ as well as other browsers. As a fallback, the Cortado Java player is used. Subtitles are unlikely to work with Cortado, because it's an applet.

If playing the episodes directly in the browser doesn't work, or if you simply don't want to do that, just download the episodes and watch them in your favourite media player.

This website

Apart from using the <video> tag, this website also uses other new additions to HTML. On browsers that support it (Firefox 3.5+, GNU IceCat 3.5+, etc.), the background features an SVG image (bgflow.svg) and transparency as well as other new CSS things are used at various places. All of this is nothing but eyecandy, and if it doesn't work because of a browser that doesn't support it, fear not! The site should still work just fine. It also works just fine without the JavaScript code. It seems to work ok in Lynx, anyway.

I'm using a special font called "Domestic Manners" in some areas of the website (it might not show on all browsers). According to this site, the font is GPL'd, though it doesn't state what version of the GPL it's under.

Denmark

Denmark is a small, cold country.

Niels

My name is Niels Serup, and I created these films. I live next to a forest. Read more about me.

Editing and encoding

Creating a nice-looking film can be difficult, especially if you want to make it look professional. Using a slow, old computer doesn't make things easier. I did manage it, however.

Editing

For my third episode I thought to myself that it could be nice to do a bit of cutting. I found PiTiVi. While still in its early fases, I found it to be very easy to work with.

Encoding

PiTiVi can also be used to render one's video, but it mysteriously kept crashing and stopping at odd times on my computer. While looking for help, I noticed that Kino didn't have any rendering problems. To make Kino render render my PiTiVi file, I created a converter. The two programs use different file formats for saving data, so it was necessary. You can download it here.

To convert my films to OGG I use ffmpeg2theora. Something like this:

WHY???

Why not?