Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

Yes, I'm a curler now. Still a beginner, but I'm working on it.

There's actually a number of clients that support RSS with bittorrent
links. In particular, most bittorrent apps. We just concentrate on
making a nicer UI for it.

And it's not a special URL. It's an http url that links to a .torrent file.

ttyl,
Chris

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Luis Villa <luis@tieguy.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk@redhat.com> wrote:
> > So help me understand, someone who uses Miro:
> >
> > Does Miro actually make use of BitTorrent to *distribute* video, or does it
> > just figure out how to download *from* BitTorrent?
> >
> > Something that combines RSS and BitTorrent seems potentially awesome -- but
> > frankly, I'm still not sure how Miro works.
>
> As I understand it, the miro RSS feed contains torrent:// links where
> the average RSS feed contains http://. So each client is getting
> notified of new episodes via rss, and then pulling those episodes via
> torrent. Makes it hard to use any client other than miro with the
> content, unfortunately.
>
> I've cc'd Chris Lahey, who I hope can clarify/correct me (he's with
> Miro, ex-Ximian, still rocking. And apparently curling?)
>
> Luis
>

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hi. It's time to talk about Fedora and video.
>
> As many of you know, we tried to start the "Fedora TV" project last fall in
> association with the nice folks at Lulu.tv. Unfortunately, between December
> 1st and January 31st, Lulu.tv went from a team of 4 engineers excited about
> Fedora as a test case for their technology, to one engineer trying
> desperately to hold things together, to out of business. Which means that
> "Fedora TV," in its current incarnation, is deader than Elvis. I'll be
> working to pull the domain away from the current abandonware site in the
> next few days.
>
> The original goal of Fedora TV was to provide a "Fedora-friendly" home for
> videos that we had some control over. I think this is still a worthwhile
> strategic goal, but since we no longer have the help of dedicated engineers,
> I no longer think it's a sensible tactical goal.
>
> The question that follows: "we've got lots of people who are excited about
> making Fedora videos. What's the best way, in the short term, to gather
> those videos together to make them accessible?"
>
> People are already using whatever solutions are available to them --
> YouTube, archive.org, blip.tv, and so forth. Maybe we can leverage some of
> these solutions to create a comprehensive "Fedora-approved" solution. If we
> choose to go this route, there are, in my view, a number of criteria.
>
> First, a couple of criteria that any solution *must* meet:
>
> 1. There must be a way to view these videos in Ogg Theora. This is perhaps
> the most difficult requirement, but also the most important. If we force
> Fedora users to download proprietary software to view Fedora videos, we
> lose.
>
> 2. There must be a one-click download of each video from *somewhere*. A
> torrent tracker seems like a good idea and a way to conserve server space,
> but in practice, people ignore these videos.
>

>From the various emails I see on campus and lists, videos on
file-sharing get blocked more because its easier to block stuff than
deal with the various lawsuits. I think various blockers just look for
'video' content (mpeg, theora,etc) in a torrent and then just fin=fin
the connections.


> 3. The "one-click download" implies that there must be a centralized *and
> robust* hosting environment for these videos. We should have confidence
> that any such hosting environment isn't likely to "go away" -- the trap we
> fell into with Lulu.tv.
>

That is the most expensive part of the deal. Contrary to the professor
complaining about his storage fees.. disks and network are not cheap.
Not if you want reliability. The first thought that came to mind was
to see if the Fedora Mirrors would be a useful area. Building a
structure that mirrors could take the 'content into the cloud' (dear
god, if I used that catch phrase correctly, smite me now).

> There are also, in my view, a few criteria that we *should* meet:
>
> 4. Users should be able to easily specify licensing of the videos.
>

What licenses would we use? What ones would be verbotten?

Do we have a screening process before the videos go up to make sure
that they are related to Fedora and not someone trying to use it as a
gnu porn upload site?

And from watching the daily MPAA/RIAA etc letters to the University..
what is the legal group that gets these subpoenas and evidence
preservation? Especially when someone puts up a 20 minute cut from
BladeRunner with some "commentary" to try and say it is a reasonable
quote on how Free Software should work. (Or they use a 20 second cut
and the MPAA still sends a takedown notice/subpeona/DMCA/ etc.) And
whether or not a 2 second music excerpt is allowed under copyright
law.. who gets stuck with the lawyers bill dealing with the lawsuit
from whoever currently 'owns' BabyGotBack.

Hopefully these are things that can be said "duh" about.. but it would
be something that would make mirrors more available if they didn't
have to worry about the legal lawsuit for aiding and abetting (or
whatever gets MPAA lawyers salivating).

The issue I see with Archive.org is that they must be dieing under
network/storage bills these days. The amount of movie and music I see
streaming to our university is pretty high. My guess is that the
flakiness is that they are having to pair back what they can offer
because the costs are going up... or what links they do have are
saturated and they are not in a position to upscale.



--
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Jeff Spaleta wrote:


Just to give you an idea... my 2 minute curling video that I made.. is
500 megs of uncompressed dv and its down to 6 megs as a theora video
when editted down with pitivi.


We can compe up with some arbitrary numbers and see how they scale in
practice. Let's say 3-5 meg per minute of footage -- a terabyte gives us
many, many hours. The real question is, how much bandwidth would that
consume if a video got super-popular?


--g

--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:


4. Users should be able to easily specify licensing of the videos.


What licenses would we use? What ones would be verbotten?


This is a simple policy question. We *will* want "open video" -- that
much we know. Licensing will come later.



Do we have a screening process before the videos go up to make sure
that they are related to Fedora and not someone trying to use it as a
gnu porn upload site?


I think we'll have to if we do our own storage. Vaniv had a mechanism for
this, which wasn't great, but it was okay. In the long run, I foresee a
SIG of video folks helping with this.



And from watching the daily MPAA/RIAA etc letters to the University..
what is the legal group that gets these subpoenas and evidence
preservation? Especially when someone puts up a 20 minute cut from
BladeRunner with some "commentary" to try and say it is a reasonable
quote on how Free Software should work. (Or they use a 20 second cut
and the MPAA still sends a takedown notice/subpeona/DMCA/ etc.) And
whether or not a 2 second music excerpt is allowed under copyright
law.. who gets stuck with the lawyers bill dealing with the lawsuit
from whoever currently 'owns' BabyGotBack.


And this is why human filters will be required. The nice thing: even if
we are *very* successful, I think we'll be looking at a limited amount of
content. If the problem is that the filterers are moving too slowly
because we've got too much content, that's a good problem to have.



Hopefully these are things that can be said "duh" about.. but it would
be something that would make mirrors more available if they didn't
have to worry about the legal lawsuit for aiding and abetting (or
whatever gets MPAA lawyers salivating).


Well, then, maybe the mirrors idea is worth pursuing.


The issue I see with Archive.org is that they must be dieing under
network/storage bills these days. The amount of movie and music I see
streaming to our university is pretty high. My guess is that the
flakiness is that they are having to pair back what they can offer
because the costs are going up... or what links they do have are
saturated and they are not in a position to upscale.


Yeah. That's my take too. I only wish I could get into a conversation
with them about it.


--g

--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 13:01 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>
> > Just to give you an idea... my 2 minute curling video that I made.. is
> > 500 megs of uncompressed dv and its down to 6 megs as a theora video
> > when editted down with pitivi.
>
> We can compe up with some arbitrary numbers and see how they scale in
> practice. Let's say 3-5 meg per minute of footage -- a terabyte gives us
> many, many hours.

it gives us 3333 hours. (more or less)

> The real question is, how much bandwidth would that
> consume if a video got super-popular?

all of it.
-sv



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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Apr 2, 2008, at 5:23 PM, Luis Villa wrote:

d. Miro. Maybe this is the way to go. It's packaged in Fedora, so
maybe
it's worth having a handful of people set up a Miro channel and
seed the
content. We could use some server space in fp.o as seed space, I
would

think. I have yet to play with Miro personally, though.


Note that last time I tried to install Miro on Fedora, it was broken;
all the default videos are in non-free codecs so Miro itself ran but
no video worked (and I seem to recall it failed badly.) Have not tried
it of late, though.


They are just now adding gstreamer support. That will help at least
with some of that.


--Chris

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Apr 2, 2008, at 5:23 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

Do we have any other options on the table for self hosting our own
video RSS aimed at populating a miro channel? Can we for example
run a project out of fedorahosted that has enough space for to
manage a theora video rss feed for miro? We could easily slap a
Video SIG together, layout the ground rules for submitting content,
select a few managing editors to control the RSS feed, and get the
ball rolling. But lets face it video requires relatively bloated
hosting space... worse than OO.org's codebase. Without a hosting
commitment we aren't gonna get very far...even with low quality
theora vids of my cat.


Oh, another option might be to look and see if you can do a branded
Miro. That's one of the things that the are doing. i.e. Miro for
free and open content or something. Fremiro? :D


--Chris

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Apr 2, 2008, at 5:35 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

Does Miro actually make use of BitTorrent to *distribute* video, or
does it just figure out how to download *from* BitTorrent?


Check with willg for the right person to ask. But their goal is for
distribution as well as downloading. Every Miro client is a
bittorrent client.


--Chris

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Christopher Blizzard wrote:


On Apr 2, 2008, at 5:35 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

Does Miro actually make use of BitTorrent to *distribute* video, or does it
just figure out how to download *from* BitTorrent?


Check with willg for the right person to ask. But their goal is for
distribution as well as downloading. Every Miro client is a bittorrent
client.


Clearly the answer here is for me/others to get Miro running on my/y'alls
systems (somehow) and see how it might work in practice.


Any idea how far out gstreamer support is?

--g

--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"

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Fedora TV, the video quandary, and a request for advice (fwd)
 

On Apr 3, 2008, at 1:49 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:


On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Christopher Blizzard wrote:


On Apr 2, 2008, at 5:35 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:

Does Miro actually make use of BitTorrent to *distribute* video,
or does it just figure out how to download *from* BitTorrent?


Check with willg for the right person to ask. But their goal is
for distribution as well as downloading. Every Miro client is a
bittorrent client.


Clearly the answer here is for me/others to get Miro running on my/
y'alls systems (somehow) and see how it might work in practice.


Any idea how far out gstreamer support is?


There are comments from Dean in my blog about it:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=346

Sounds like the code is in there and it's a pref switch. No idea how
stable/good it is, though.


--Chris

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