I discovered the animated short film, Trusted Computing, today. Great movie! It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Sampling Plus 1.0) license that I wouldn't categorize as free but certainly more permissive than the standard copyrights. However, I was irritated by the lack of a truly high quality OGG video, whereas proprietary formats such as the Quicktime .mov had such quality copies.

Fortunately, I had the handy ffmpeg2theora tool at hand. It is a command line tool where entering a simple command encodes an OGG copy of the specified video file with default settings:

ffmpeg2theora video.mov

However, I wanted to have the highest quality possible. So, I entered the command with a -v argument

ffmpeg2theora -v 10 video.mov

where the number after -v defines the output quality in a scale from 0 to 10. (The default value is 5.) You can find more about the encoding options by entering "man ffmpeg2theora" or "ffmpeg2theora --help".

This produced a 66.3MB high quality video with Theora and Vorbis encodings. You can find the video file here.

Also, if you are interested in the "Treacherous Computing" technology, you can read Can You Trust Your Computer? by Richard Stallman.