Re: 4/14 Friends of GNOME videos finished and posted

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> 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.

Wow, this all looks great!

> 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.

It'll be wonderful to have video material on gnome3.org.

> 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.

It would be really good to have screenshots from this kind of system for
gnome3.org. (Hint hint!)

Regarding updates to gnome3.org: it would be good to try and time these
so they come in a steady flow rather than all once. That way we can
generate regular announcements for the microblogs.

Allan
-- 
Blog: https://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org