Will there be any way to record this conversation and upload it to Commons? I'm not all that familiar with Skype, so I don't know if it's even possible. But this might be something worthwhile to make available to everybody, especially since not every person will have the option of tuning into the Skypecast for various reasons, regardless of if they wanted to. Z

On 8/25/06, Ryan Dabler <zhaladshar(a)gmail.com> wrote: On 8/25/06, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote: Austin

On 8/25/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Unfortunately, one limitation of HLS's video setup was that the live stream was only available in Real format. We are, however, going out of our way to make sure that when the recordings are made available, it will be in a Free format—this is, in fact, the reason we don't have them yet. Audio recordings were posted as soon as humanly possible in their original format, MP3, a format readily understood by a wide variety of free software players. If you mean "patent-free" in addition to your "free software" constraint, however, converted Vorbis files exist also. Austin

On 8/25/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Of course you can. Hell, it's even included in the base Debian repository (not non-US/non-free). They're not on that page, but they do exist; I'll ask around for you. Or you could get one of your non-free friends to transcode them. Kyle did an excellent job last year, and I'm sure he could have done even more this year if we'd given him the resources. See below. It's not a matter of delegation, it's a simple cost-benefit analysis. Our arrangement with HLS AV gave us much better coverage than last year, and at no cost to us. We could have taken our $10,000 budget for bringing Wikimedians from elsewhere in the world and sunk it into providing live Vorbis streams of every room, but what would that have given us? A warm, fuzzy feeling for being slightly Freer? It would have been nice to have live coverage of every room, I'll grant, but a delay of a few hours isn't that bad, and the program team was very good about putting events of particular interest in rooms with video. Believe it or not, your soul will not burn up if you use Helix player. I had to leave before the skypecast, unfortunately, but from what I saw it didn't work out very well. In the future, we should certainly leverage all the resources available to us; this said, Andrew was good enough to open up his interview in the first place, and we should applaud the effort. If this were an official WMF Q&A, planned by the Foundation and billed far and wide for live community participation, I would naturally have a different view. Austin

On 8/25/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I never saw any of those requests. And funnily, I am one of those who can grant access to those tapes. No-one proposed either. I must have missed that question too. It seems Austin did not either. Maybe you should update your address book. Cheers, Delphine -- ~notafish

On 8/25/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sure, I've discussed it with several attorneys, and many more have discussed it ad nauseam on the various free software mailing lists. You can read more about MP3's patents and licensing on Wikipedia. Harvard's equipment doesn't record Vorbis. It'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't. Sorry. I do not remember hearing such a request from you; I certainly wouldn't have ignored it. The 17 tapes in question are currently en route to George Chriss, whom you might remember from the conference. He's tasked with processing the tapes and encoding video of each session in Ogg Theora, which will be uploaded to Commons as soon as they're finished. I have every confidence in his abilities. I've seen the files with my own eyes, but I don't know where they're posted. Obtaining them hasn't been a priority for me, because I have an MP3 player. You're right, we never asked you. We're good, but we're not clairvoyant. Everyone was welcome to make their own recordings, as I told everyone who asked me. Many people did. Real gave us $100,000, to be split amongst the conference organizers as we pleased. And we would've gotten away with it, too... I never suggested that you use RealPlayer, and I'm not even advocating the use of the Real format. Although I don't object to non-free software on principle, I absolutely believe that the formats used for information exchange should be free, and I was very disappointed to learn that Real was the only option for the live streams. Being practical, however, I was consoled by the knowledge that they would be archived in Ogg Theora for posterity, whatever it took to make that happen. It's fine to talk about could haves and should haves now, but the fact is, we never heard from you before the conference. In the end, I think we still made out okay. Austin

On 8/25/06, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote: I even asked you about it in person at Wikimania on Monday after the conference was over. :-/ I understand that things were busy and stressful. I also followed up in email, right after the conference to the email first mentioning collecting the tapes. In any case, I understand now that someone has the tapes and is transfering them (and encoding them as Theora, etc), so I am glad I asked. The wikimania pages said it would be streamed early on... It wasn't clear, at least to me, that it wasn't all well taken care of. I fail to see how updating my address book is going to improve communications with people whom I was standing a few feet away from in the Berkman center. The argument is foolish. Opportunities were missed due to on person in particulars fault but due to the inevitable result of everyone working at capacity. I've complained less to criticise you or any of the other conference staff, who did an impressive job in many regards, but rather more to make sure people are aware that there are people who care enough to complain, and thus there should be people you can call on to worry about these matters in the future.

On 8/25/06, Walter Vermeir <walter(a)wikipedia.be> wrote: Someone sent me a transcoded Ogg of the arbcom panel which sounded terrible, as typical for a low bitrate ogg transcoded from a low bitrate MP3. I intended no insult to your files, although I had assumed they would be just as bad. :)

Anthere schreef: The only Macintosh I have is an antique. But so far I know the recommended player for playing Ogg Vorbis on Mac, at least if it is MacOS X, is VLC; http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html That is a very advanced player&more but you can also use it for playing a Ogg Vorbis file. My apologies btw for the hard words in the email to otrs-en-l I did not knew it was you :-) Greetings, Walter -- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community