Re: [Audio-video] Recording Dr. Stallman on Thursday.

[Jason Self]

Sure! I'm happy to help!

> Our position on shooting events has always been to ask the presentor how 
> they wish to copyright the material we generate, and so we would like to 
> ask you if there is a specific GPL license or Creative Commons licence 
> Dr. Stallman wishes us to use to copyright the video?

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 license or later versions.

> Our current workflow is Mac based, and as such we have usually just gone 
> with Quicktime for our encoding. We are using this event as an 
> opportunity to explore other formats to incorporate into our workflow in 
> order to meet Dr. Stallman's request to use Matroska VP8. If you have 
> any suggestions for tools to use for transcoding they would be 
> appreciated. Transcoding will basically be a necessity, as our cameras 
> produce over 10 gigabytes of video per hour we use them, and this will 
> be times 3.
> 
> What is it you want us to provide to you from the shoot? We usually edit 
> events like this together to produce a chronologically contiguous 
> segment, then put a title header and copyright footer on them, then 
> transcode them to a final container format. We can do this, then provide 
> you a copy of it, or just transcode the un-processed pieces we will 
> generate to make it easier to send to you and let you guys take it from 
> there. Just let us know.

Ogg Vorbis/Theora are commonly used, along with WebM. (Note that the container
used with WebM is a *modified* Matroska container.)

If we could have versions in both formats, that would be great.

There is some software available at http://firefogg.org/nightly/ that can be
used for encoding (the ones ending in .macosx.)

ffmpeg2theora can be used to encode the video in to Ogg Voribs/Theora, while the
ffmpeg.macosx has support to encode into WebM.

While FFmpeg proper also has support for encoding to Ogg Vorbis and Theora,
ffmpeg2theora it is technically superior and is definitely preferred when
encoding audio & video using those codecs & container.

A QuickTime plugin is also available at http://xiph.org/quicktime/ but I don't
think it uses the latest version of libtheora (the upcoming version 1.2) which
includes many improvements over version 1.1.

Please let me know if you need any help with these tools, as I use the command
line ones every day. (I don't have a computer running Mac OS X so my ability to
help with the QuickTime plugin is very limited.)

> Also, what resolution would you like us to send to you? As I said, it 
> will be recorded in 1080i, which is rather large to keep around. We 
> usually scale it down to 720p at 60fps, which makes an hour of video 
> roughly 2 GB.

720p would be great, but 60fps might be too much. If you could also provide a
smaller version (perhaps 480p?) for web streaming that would also be good.

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