The other day John Gilmore pointed me towards a very interesting initiative: the Internet Archive is currently working on making all its videos accessible to OLPC XO users by converting them to Ogg Theora. And in this case "all its videos" means 185,000 moving images, including many cartoons and full-length movies that have fallen into the public domain.

Now that's quite an impressive number I dare say! I'm also pleasantly surprised by the speed - up to a maximum of 1000 videos per hour (!) - with which the Internet Archive is converting its content. To date almost 50% of their videos have been made available as .ogg.

Looney Tunes on my XO!

What's also great is that the Internet Archive is currently working on a solution that recognizes when an XO running the browse-activity tries to access a video. In that case the user is directly sent to the .ogg version (where available) instead of seeing the Flash version and manually having to select "Ogg Video" via the menu on the left-hand side.

Unfortunately a bug in browse still makes it impossible to actually download the videos to the XOs instead of having to stream them. In John Gilmore's view this could have quite an impact on the network in OLPC deployments:

Once the word gets out to kids in Peru and Uruguay about this archive, their long-haul bandwidth usage will probably rise dramatically...

I think it's great that the Internet Archive is making such an outstanding contribution to the free software and content ecosystem. Looking through some of the videos which are already available I realized how valuable these are and I'm sure many children with XOs from around the world will have a great experience enjoying them.

Plus, I really couldn't think of a better way to keep myself entertained while cooking than to watch an awesome Looney Tunes episode on my XO!