Free Me Too

[Jonathan Roberts]

Hey :)

On 18/02/2008, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Hi
>
>
> We have been discussing taking Free Me to the next step. Free Me is a
> collection of open licensed content bundled with a Live CD. Jonathan
> Roberts, I appreciate your suggestions. Let's get started.

Wow, totally awesome that you're picking this up now!! I wish I'd been
able to finish it properly myself but I didn't have the skills to
polish it like it needed so perhaps you can all do it justice :)

One comment I do have though, and which I guess you're all aware of,
is the CC LiveContent which came along just as mine finished - part of
the reason it finished actually! There's is Fedora based too I
think...
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/FreeMeToo
>
> In particular, any hints on finding some of the content under open codec
> formats or conversion procedures would be appreciated.

Conversion procedures I can definitely help with, though you might
need people to tweak it a little bit as I had some quality problems
and issues with PAL/NTSC and sections being cut off the edge of the
screen...

ffmpeg2theora I think is the best tool for the conversion of the
video, and then there's loads of small command line apps which will
convert entire folders of audio to ogg too :) I'll try and remember
what I used. This article might be of some use:

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/command_line_media_editing

Oh and another point: part of my goals with free me was to make it
workable without even having to boot the live disc, so I made sure all
the content was accessed from a folder in the root of the disc which
was pointed at by a sym link. I think this is definitely worth doing,
and maybe an autorun for windows users to fire up a browser with some
more info? OpenCD style...

I also put the videos on as a video dvd so it would work in a
standalone player, but there were issues between the two different
filesystem types that caused it to not work on some older bioses.

>Additional
> content suggestions too. Music, Videos, Books etc. They should be freely
> distributable and preferably have no use restrictions. I will put
> together a Fedora spin bundling all these content after sometime.

I'll take a look at the list you already have and add anything else i
can think of. I guess you checked the list on
freeme.questionsplease.org?

Thanks all, and best of luck!

Jon