GNOME Hackfest Videos

[Brad Taylor <brad getcoded net>]

Greetings fine folks!

During the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest in sunny San Diego, California a couple of weeks ago, Bryen and myself acted as informal videographers, recording interviews and reactions to the hubbub of the conference.  Since then, I've had the chance to edit down a couple of the interviews that I shot with my shiny new HDSLR (one with GNOME Accessibility Grand Pu-Bah, Willie Walker, and a quick over-beers interview with David Bolter, Mozilla A11y ninja), and I've been looking for a place to host the video, and potentially to restart Alberto Ruiz's awesome GNOME TV project.

Alberto started GNOME TV as both a GIT module (that contained some unifying branding) and a Vimeo channel, using Vimeo mostly because they'll allow you to download the source material (in his case, an Ogg video) if you have an account.  Normally, I would have continued with that, but unfortunately, Vimeo does not provide the ability to closed caption their videos.  For this reason, I'm inclined to move over to YouTube, as they not only will provide automatic captioning for free (which seems to be a good first-order approach which can be easily tweaked manually), but you can provide captions in multiple languages, making it a resource for not only the hearing impaired, but folks who are not native English speakers.

Clearly there will be some folks who have a religious/moral/whatever objection to YouTube, so we should probably also provide those videos in Theora format as well.

I'd like to find out the following the marketing geniuses here:

   * Does anyone have suggestions for alternate video hosting methods/sites/etc to YouTube that also provide closed 
     captioning?

   * If using YouTube doesn't raise the hair on people's necks too much, does GNOME have a YouTube account that I
     could post videos to?

   * Is there a place that myself and others could host Theora versions of GNOME-related interviews and videos?

   * Would anyone from the illustrious Art team be interested in helping me out with the GNOME TV artwork?  I've done
     a little title sequence for it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Q1VDKOQHU), but I could do a bit more in 
     collaboration with a talented and fancy-haired artist.  I will pay in beers and beer-flavored non-alcoholic ice 
     cream.

With HDSLRs becoming incredibly affordable these days, I wonder if we could start doing video interviews at more GNOME-sponsored hackfests.  You could set up a pretty great rig that can shoot in the highest HD quality (1080p) for about $1000.

Best,

-Brad