Screencasts - Cheese

[Jeff Spaleta]

2008/6/10 Clint Savage <herlo1 at gmail.com>:
> That's the idea.  I've not confirmed it all with them yet, but they are
> interested in this idea.  They want the videos on their site so they get the
> hits and the traffic as well.
> I was thinking it might be a good compromise to have links on the
> fedoraproject.org wiki (or marketing materials) that redirected them to a
> gurulabs page with the video
> they could play.  What do you think?

To be quite honest. I simply do not care where the video is hosted.  I
care about generating content by and for the Fedora community,
preferable using the tools that we can ship.  The whole point is to
stimulate further interest in unencumbered codecs and associated tools
through the generation of content that is actually useful.  The Fedora
community needs to dogfood open video for its own purposes as part of
a larger goal of seeing the video formats and tools broadly adopted.
If we don't do it.. no one will.

Right now the only really effective tools we have for video
distribution to get video into the hands of users in some organized
way is the gstreamer backed miro available in Fedora 9.
Flash based video simply embedded in a web browser just isn't going to
cut it yet due to a lack of support in the native flash binary for
ogg.  The reliance on A/V in flash needs to be solved before we can
make use of it in the context of the larger project offerings.

So instead we can produce a series of rss feeds aimed at Miro and
encourage users to use miro to watch Fedora community videos.  But
Fedora doesn't have to host the videos, just like Fedora's planet
doesn't host individual blogs.  We can build a feed that points into
guru labs or other hosting spaces on a video by video basis. I'm sure
Red Hat Magazine will want to get in on the act too from time to time.
 Though if guru labs wants to gift some hosting space that the wider
Fedora community can use, beyond what you need, to host tutorial vids
or other utility videos I'm sure our infrastructure lead can talk to
your employer about what a hosting commitment in this area can and
should look like.  I know Mike has put some thought into taking
resource donations from outside entities.

Video content is quite new for us.

> What are the  licensing options?  I've never even looked into licensing video.  If it were
> text,
> Open Publication License would work.  Does that work for video?

It's going to be one of the more liberal CC licenses, perhaps
something as liberal as CC-BY-SA.  I'm going to make an arbitrary
decision for now that for the time being people experimenting with
Fedora videos license under CC-BY-SA, with an understanding that if
the acceptable licensing changes as part of on-going discussions the
video creators are willing to relicense the works accordingly.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> I think they'd go for a simple, 'Video hosting provided by Guru Labs (and
> they're web address)', along with text that explains we're a Linux training
> company or something.
> I'll talk with them about these details this week and see how/if they would
> like to seriously pursue this idea.

We'll find a way to do something.  We can probably just add a tagline
in the miro description for each video noting a hosting credit on a
case by case basis. We can just limit the tagline to some reasonable
length as a general policy bound.

> Tricky part is taking the time to do them, and to get others to take that
> time.  However, I feel the time invested in these videos is worth the effort
> for the community as a
> whole.  I feel there are people who learn well by reading and others who
> learn well kinesthetically.  So lets get more people involved in videos.


We have to start somewhere.  I think the real video ninjas are out
there waiting to be discovered in the community.  I think if we create
a way for them to easily share 'useful' videos through something like
miro, the right people will start stepping out of the userbase cloud
as new contributors in this new area.  Don't get me wrong, it's not
going to be easy.  People with real video editing experience are going
to be frustrated by the limited nature of toolset we can ship. The
editing tools we can provide are still rough. The more mature tools we
can't touch because of their direct reliance on ffmpeg which I haven't
figure out how to ship with the encumbered bits stripped out
adequately yet.  We need to find the 'right' people who have an
interest in video and can impact the development of the gstreamer
based tools that we can ship and help move development forward.  But
we have to do something to jumpstart the discussion around open media
formats and shippable tools instead of spending all our times wringing
our hands over our inability to support encumbered media formats.
It's time we start producing our own open content, relevent to our own
open community using our own open tools, the rest of the world be
damned!

-jef