[ale] Delivering ALE meetings on "Video" (was ALE CENTRAL for Thurs., 12/8, 7:30pm: SCALIX)

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 06:40 +0000, aaron wrote:
> I have the video equipment readily available and, since I'm at most every 
> meeting filling the moderator role, it is no problem to make a video 
> recording of  the main presentations. At Jim Kinney's request, and in 
> response to his offer for hosting an ALE video repository, I recorded this 
> month's SCALIX presentation. That's the easy part.
> 
> The challenge, as well as the more time and resource consuming part of the 
> process,  is capturing and encoding the 60 or 90 minutes of video in a format 
> that's appropriate and useful for delivery. Given that this is a Linux group, 
> I think the encoding format should, at the least, be a cross platform codec 
> with established, readily available Linux support, even if it is unlikely to 
> be open source (almost all of the current media CODEC schemes are proprietary 
> and thus are not  available as default components of free Linux distros). 
> Functionally, the codec format must also create files small enough to stream 
> on high-speed or be easily downloaded and yet still deliver a reasonable 
> quality image with readable slides.
> 
> I've been discussing this a bit with Jim Kinney off list and researching the 
> issue, but I haven't hit on a good solution yet. From my extensive video 
> experience, I know that using video resolution (720x480) framed to include 
> the speaker with the slide projections filling about 70% of the screen area,  
> DV (25mbps) and well encoded DVD (~10mbps) are just barely up to meeting the 
> quality requirement for readability.  Given that DV is ~13gb/hr and quality 
> DVD is 4.4gb/hr., I'm skeptical that mpeg is going to provide a useful video 
> without  needing at least a gigabyte for every hour.

Bandwidth issues can easily swamp my upload capabilities (768k). I am
envisioning only the speaker portion to make the video portion smaller.
This would be 25-40 minutes (unless it's me giving another 90 minute
yawner :). So the upload amount drops to ~2Gb or about 40 minutes to
upload one copy.

Ugh.

Maybe BitTorrent...

> 
> Video format suggestions are welcome, and I can encode on Mac if the Linux 
> side is playback only, but my experience is that most of the stuff that gets 
> labeled as video on the web isn't. In response to the video problems, I am 
> also pursuing some alternative delivery approaches for providing useable 
> visual information with much smaller bandwidth requirements, specifically 
> along the lines of delivering the presentations as slides synchronized to an 
> MP3 narration track of the program.

A most presenters are using some form of presentation tool, a la Open
Office, this is a very good idea. Sound import as mp3 into a
presentation and then adjust the slide timing by watching the video is a
very workable process. If the presentation needs alternate video input
from a gizmo brought in (I'm thinking about the VOIP presentation
showing the hardware) then perhaps a low resolution video coupled with a
hi-res still would suffice.

It can all be "web-a-fied" with the export to Flash capability in OOo.
Of course those of use who use a dual opteron system for a desktop can't
view it as Macromedia _still_ has no 64-bit capable Linux binary and the
32-bit version crashes on load.

> 
> peace
> aaron
> 
> 
> On Sunday 11 December 2005 15:30, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > Trey Sizemore wrote:
> > > 
> > > I think this is a great idea.  Provided we have the commitment, it
> > > would be great to have the sessions video-taped and made available for
> > > those that have a conflict on the night of a given presentation.
> > > 
> > > Does anyone have equipment to do this for the respective Central and NE
> > > meetings?
> > > 
> > 
> > I second this, for the same reason.  I'm not sure how many people here
> > cannot make it due to scheduling conflicts and such, but for the moment,
> > I'm one of those, too.  :-(
> > 
> > 	- Mike
> > 
> > -- 
> > Michael B. Trausch                                      fd0man at gmail.com
> > AIM: MB Trausch                             Jabber:  mtrausch at jabber.com
> > 
> > 
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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