[nycbug-talk] YouTube Channel for BSD Technical Talks

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "rl" == Ray Lai <nycbug at cyth.net> writes:

    rl> Who would provide the infrastructure?

I just host things on my DSL, which ought to work fine for videos only
announced on this list.  If more than one or two people want to
download at a time, you can buy cheapass shared hosting, ask one of
the BSD projects to host it, ask NYC*BUG to host it.  If it gets even
busier you can use bittorrent.  in short, everything we did before
Youtube appeared.

Isaac's Obama link under ``no technical barrier to sharing'' suggests
blip.tv over Youtube, but this is the first I've heard of it.

Hosting should be cheap enough, and easy enough for someone who says
he's interested in BSD.  I feel like, for someone advocating BSD, not
being able to post a big file on the web is sort of like an adult
eskimo not knowing how to make a fishing hook.

``We need to communicate in files that aren't easily playable on BSD
because our knowledge of BSD hasn't helped us learn how to publish our
own shit on the Internet?''  either way it's thoroughly pathetic.

    rl> I did use pedro@'s yt program to extract Youtube videos and
    rl> watch them on mplayer.

On OpenBSD mplayer or Linux mplayer? What does mplayer use to play
yt's fetched content?  AIUI on Linux this uses shared libs from
realplayer, so I don't know how it would work on OpenBSD.  Is it some
COMPAT_LINUX mplayer-linux port or something?

    rl> What I can suggest you do if you care so much, is work on a
    rl> convenient Flash player that works well in BSD.

no thanks, I'm not going to play catch-up with proprietary formats.

And remember, on this particular occasion I'm not complaining about
Youtube videos posted by Windows users.  I'm saying, ``why is a
supposed BSD advocate posting videos in a format that's hard to view
under BSD?  when better formats have been available for longer?  It's
like he assumes no one actually uses the thing he's advocating, and I
think he's probably about right.''

Finally, even if it weren't a depressing waste of time, I lack the
skill and the drive to write a Flash replacement, while having more
than enough skill and drive to encode videos in a reasonable format.
Is that so surprising?  Is no one else in the same situation?

``Just write a Herculean amount of code if you care so damn much''
shouldn't be a way of shutting people up.

    rl> What formats do Ubuntu distribute in?

Theora container.  not sure what's inside but Ubuntu doesn't
distribute proprietary things like FLASH with their base system, so
it's almost certainly BSD-friendly.

    rl> What format is [CCC videos] in?

H.264 inside .mp4 container that was made with one of the free Linux
tools and plays well under mplayer.

For the few things I've encoded, I use mpeg4 made by lavc or ffmpeg,
with ogg audio, inside .mkv container.  This plays on OpenBSD and
supports non-square pixels and mux'd text subtitles.

All three play without binary blobs so they work well under BSD, and
in Linux-land we've been encoding all three since before Youtube
existed, except maybe the H.264 but I think even that.
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