4/14 Friends of GNOME videos finished and posted



Unlike the previews from late November, these files can be considered "done." I have reduced the bandwidth requirements by half while mostly retaining the same level of quality. (Yay, codec progress!)

http://people.gnome.org/~jclinton/FoG/

I think it would be fine to put these finalized versions in the git repo. for site development convenience. (I would not put anything this large which is anticipated to change in to a git repo.)

There will not be H.264 versions of these files as we cannot pay the streaming licenses and the FoG target audience is going to be running a browser which can play Theora or WebM. Also, these files are so small, bandwidth shouldn't be a concern.

My suggestion would be to use straight-forward, browser UI, nested <video> tags to put these on the FoG site update (with the WebM version on the outside so that it is preferred). The video URL would be randomly selected from a list that we provide by either client-side JS or server-side scripting. I also believe that http://universalsubtitles.org/ is the method by which we should solve the a11y and i18n challenges; it's crowd sourced via this method. If there aren't any show-stoppers and no one else steps up to implement this change, I will implement the suggested site changes. Later, if bandwidth becomes a problem, perhaps we can distribute the load by asking people to mirror a video and we can use the same random URL provider to rotate between mirrors.

All videos are 720P 30fps with 128Kbit/s Vorbis stereo audio. The WebM videos targeted 1Mbit/s. The Theora videos targeted 2Mbit/s and have slightly more artifacting despite being almost twice as large.

I am still thinking about what to do about the gnome3.org video hosting and video format questions as the audience and bandwidth situation is slightly different. And no solution proposed so far is perfect.

I've solved a number of problems with my video workflow (by building a bunch of stuff from svn and git, by hand) so I can crank the remaining 10 FoG videos out over the coming days including that re-spin of the GNOME 3 preview that I have promised.

Also, I just today finished assembling a GNOME 3 installation with the finalized Adwaita theme, the new GNOME font (Cantarell) with git master OTF hinting, the latest GNOME Shell git, and most of the GNOME 3 applications in their current state. GNOME 3 is looking *fantastic* now that the design vision is coming together with the art team's work. I'm hugely optimistic about the GNOME 3 final product and we are rapidly approaching the time when producing materials that look near-identical to the final version becomes achievable.



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