Discovering Roman ancient villa through GoogleMaps

From Nature: Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. (…)
Luca Mori reports his findings on this blog post. On Gmap you can see the discovered villa.
Luca then created CyberArchaeologist.net: In the world many places exist that deserve of being investigate to you. For this it is necessary collaboration with the persons of the place, with who it knows to recognize the places and with who it knows the history well.
An Italian television (La7) made a report about it. And you could possibily see the video at mms://videoteca.cdn…. I could NOT see it since I use GNU/Linux and MMS (the mms:// part in the previous URL) or ‘ Microsoft Media Server ‘ protocol is Microsoft’s proprietary network streaming protocol. Microsoft has never released a specification to describe how MMS actually works, yet it is extensively used by their Microsoft media player software. (info about MMS protocol taken from http://sdp.ppona.com/ and I didn’t check if they are still true). I could probably try to download the last codecs for my Free Software player that someone has retroengineered but this is not the point. Just as much as http:// is an open protocol that allows anyone to contribute (for example, Luca was able to contribute using the Web and providing info on the Web), mms:// is a closed protocol which does not allow evolution, contribution, freedom. Seeing videos on GNU/Linux is always a bit problematic, since there are no open protocols for streaming videos, or I’m missing something? Vorbis? How can we make an open protocol hugely adapted?
By the way, good spot Luca!

2 thoughts on “Discovering Roman ancient villa through GoogleMaps

  1. Marco Fabbri

    I managed to see the video using xine with the win32 codecs (from Marillat repository) package (on Ubuntu Hoary), Debian with the Marillat repository would also work.

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