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

[aaron]

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.

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.

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
> 
>