Events FAD engineering-project (Goal 3) update

[Mel Chua]

Update on the "engineering sprinting time!!!" portion of the upcoming 
Events FAD: it's starting to look quite interesting.

Folks on this list have probably heard mention of freeseer, the open 
source event-recording that Andrew Ross and others are working on. 
Andrew: "freeseer in a nutshell... captures vga output and microphone 
sound, mixes them to produce a video capture of any vga signal." Code at 
http://github.com/fosslc/freeseer/, or 
http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/node/596 for the longer story. This is why 
we were originally planning on bringing Andrew and Thanh to Raleigh.

However, after talking tonight we figured it would be just as well for 
them to sprint remotely, which is a lot easier logistically (and saves 
us a lot of budget too). Freeseer code is ~400 lines of python; it's 
simple and development is basically done, it's testing and docs that are 
needed to help it along in its current state.

EXCEPT. Those of you who looked at the github list may catch the word 
'rpmfusion' in the README and twitch a little. Freeseer currently 
requires ffmpeg, mencoder, and mplayer, and because of the way it uses 
codecs, it isn't kosher for Fedora as it stands. *If* we could fix that, 
we'd have a truly free and unencumbered event-recording solution on our 
hands.

And it turns out that we probably can.

Logs of Andrew, Clint, zxiiro, Dennis, and Jon starting to figure out 
the gameplan are at 
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-planning/2010-01-15/fudcon-planning.2010-01-15-02.36.log.html, 
which is also listed in 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events_FAD_2010#Meetings. The short 
version is "use gstreamer" - maybe Andrew, Clint, or someone else can 
give a more accurate longer summary, after zxiiro does a little testing 
of the stuff Clint suggested.

In other news, we now have $874.30 remaining for travel funds, so if you 
need plane tickets or hotel rooms to participate, holler to the list to 
let us know what you're going to do and how much it would cost and we'll 
see what we can do. (David Nalley is currently in the queue, and I 
believe that's all.)

--Mel