[ale] Delivering ALE meetings on "Video"

Mon Dec 12 07:25:44 EST 2005

On Monday 12 December 2005 14:09, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 06:40 +0000, aaron wrote:
> > [snippage] 
> > 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.

Ben was pretty concise with his presentation and came in at 57 min.; maybe 5 
minutes of that was the usual slightly OT banter with peanut gallery.  As 
it's been my job to keep an eye on the speaker clock for a number of 
meetings, I can say 50 to an hour is more the expected norm.

I have no problem posting a 4gig DVD in the wee hours if the interested people 
have the patience and you have the bandwidth to do the downloads and burn or 
play the file.  The encoding is a no brainer with the bundled iDVD software 
on my OSeX box. All this is a little bit time and bandwidth heavy on both the 
send and recieve ends, but it could work for now.

I'll be happy to do this with the SCALIX presentation for a trial this week.

> Ugh.
> Maybe BitTorrent...

I don't think Bit Torrent will do much good, since we aren't likely to have 
dozens of seeds on line at any given time (unless the Bit Torrent mechanism 
is not the pure peer to peer system I think it is).

> > 
> > 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.

I consulted with Bjorn Roche about this idea yesterday, since his XOwave 
program is all about handling audio and media files, and he recently leaped 
into programming QuickTime for his commercial OSeX version.  The short of it 
is that we think QuckTime would be an fairly easy solution to implement. The 
framework already supports markers for visual display references and such.  
Direct Linux support _IS_ still an issue, but there are a couple of 
OpenQuickTime options that may fill the cross platform requirements.

(We talked about Flash as an option but, as your 64 bit situation shows, Flash 
support of Linux is marginal and inconsistent.)

We're in the early stages of investigating the ideas. It may even be that 
OO-Impress can already be used (or programmed to) play it's slides 
synchronously to an audio track.  It is my understanding that these 
presentation packages will already load slides to music or audio tracks, but 
only in an evenly timed sequence.

Again, all suggestions welcome.

peace
aaron

> 
> > 
> > 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
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> -- 
> 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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