Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 1:03 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> a. archive.org.  Solves almost all of these criteria, and we have a strong
>> affinity with their mission of building a digital commons -- but their
>> infrastructure has been *very* flaky lately, and is turning into a bit of a
>> dumping ground.  Their RSS feeds and search both seem to be pretty broken on
>> a pretty regular basis.
>
> I agree.. If archive.org worked....it would be great. I've had trouble using
> it. But perhaps there is a conversation here that needs to be had with them
> concerning why its busted. Can we help 'fix' it?

If I could get someone from archive.org to return my emails.  Maybe 
someone else could have better luck?

>> c. Roll our own.  This will take clueful engineers, but there are a lot of
>> options.  Vaniv, the Wordpress fork that spun out of Lulu.tv, is one. Plumi,
>> a plug-in for Plone, is another.  Mv_Embed, a plug-in for MediaWiki, is a
>> third. I'm sure there are others.  The big downside here is that Fedora
>> Infrastructure already has plenty of stuff to keep track of, and managing a
>> video content site is a pretty big chunk of work.
>>
> Can mediawiki scale for this?

I don't know enough about its design to say.  *Any* self-hosting operation 
is going to require a *ton* of space, though.

>> d. Miro.  Maybe this is the way to go.  It's packaged in Fedora, so maybe
>> it's worth having a handful of people set up a Miro channel and seed the
>> content. We could use some server space in fp.o as seed space, I would
>> think.  I have yet to play with Miro personally, though.
>
> We should absolutely be leveraging Miro as a client interface.
> AB-SO-FRELLING-LUTELY
> There are other applications in the space as well...for example little old
> gpodder that could use a default fedora feed. I'm pretty sure that the
> maintainer of the gpodder package would look at including a default channel
> definition for fedora videos :->
>
> But the question is how do we go about populating a channel for miro and
> friends? Its just an rss feed right?   And are there any submarine
> trademarking issues here that would prevent us from including our own Fedora
> channel in the miro defaults as we ship it?

So help me understand, someone who uses Miro:

Does Miro actually make use of BitTorrent to *distribute* video, or does 
it just figure out how to download *from* BitTorrent?

Something that combines RSS and BitTorrent seems potentially awesome -- 
but frankly, I'm still not sure how Miro works.

>> The simplest thing is to tell Fedora video contributors to contribute to
>> archive.org, set up an RSS filter to pull Fedora-themed videos from the
>> oft-broken archive.org RSS feed, and let the chips fall where they may --
>> but I don't know if that's the *best* answer.
>
> Do we have any other options on the table for self hosting our own video 
> RSS aimed at populating a miro channel?  Can we for example run a 
> project out of fedorahosted that has enough space for to manage a theora 
> video rss feed for miro?  We could easily slap a Video SIG together, 
> layout the ground rules for submitting content, select a few managing 
> editors to control the RSS feed, and get the ball rolling.  But lets 
> face it video requires relatively bloated hosting space... worse than 
> OO.org's codebase.  Without a hosting commitment we aren't gonna get 
> very far...even with low quality theora vids of my cat.

Yep.  This continues to be the biggest problem, and one of the reasons I 
went with Lulu.tv in the first place.  Aside from archive.org, I don't 
have any easy answers.

--g

-- 
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"