No. We figured that uploading to YouTube is the only way we can get all the videos out before Wikimania 2014.

(Longer, more technical answer follows)
We performed a series of pilot tests in December and early January and found two main technical problems with uploading the videos from Hong Kong to Commons.

The first one is bandwidth. We have about 1TB of video footage. Because Hong Kong is on the opposite side of the planet from the WMF datacenters, we can only eke out an average speed of 50kB/s even on a "fast" connection in Hong Kong. At that rate it'll take 250 computer-days (plus extra time cost due to errors etc) of non-stop uploading to get it done. We don't have that many dedicated volunteers who are willing to donate that much machine time. In contrast, we can get an average speed of 500kB/s uploading to YouTube because they have a local node in Hong Kong. Enoch Tam (aka. "ET", many of you will remember him for all the errands he ran at Wikimania) and myself are donating all our machine idle time to the task, so we're confident it'll be done in less than a month.

The second challenge is rendering. YouTube isn't just a video CDN; it is a combined rendering and distribution service. The footage we got from SocRec is in unedited 2-4GB chunks of M2T and MTS files, which Commons cannot handle. Uploading to Commons would require the use of rendering software (and a lot of computing) to convert and edit them to OGV. This requires a further amount of volunteer dedication, video-editing software, and computing power which we don't have. The strategy at the moment is that we upload the raw footage to YouTube, then edit them into sessions using YouTube's browser video editor.

To see the details and progress of what we're doing, see https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Video_upload .

We did contemplate, at one point about two weeks ago, that we shouldn't even attempt to upload the videos from Hong Kong, and just mail the 2TB external HDD with the raw footage to WMF or WMUK. Now that Andrew pointed out that downloading and keeping a copy of YouTube videos violates their TOS regardless of licence, I guess we could've just given up back then. I guess the best course of action now is that we continue uploading and editing the videos on YouTube. If someone at WMF or WMUK is willing to render and edit the videos again from scratch, we'll send them the HDD after we're done here.

Deryck

On 20 Jan 2014 23:19, "Andrew Lih" <andrew@andrewlih.com> wrote:

Any plans to upload them to Commons or Internet Archive, or is this something we can get volunteers to help with?

The only reason is that in general, downloading and keeping videos from YouTube violates their terms of service. Even if they are CC licensed.

Thanks.

-Andrew

-Andrew Lih
Associate professor of journalism, American University
Email: andrew@andrewlih.com
WEB: http://www.andrewlih.com
BOOK: The Wikipedia Revolution: http://www.wikipediarevolution.com
PROJECT: Wiki Makes Video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Makes_Video

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 11:59 AM, Deryck Chan <deryckchan@gmail.com> wrote:

Good evening Wikimaniacs!

We now have a distributed effort by multiple volunteers in Hong Kong to upload all the video footage from Wikimania 2013 onto YouTube. If you gave a presentation or workshop at Wikimania (and haven't requested that we don't video you), keep an eye on WMHK's YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/WikimediaHK

The plan is that all videos will be available by the end of February.

We'd be grateful if you can watch your video and see if there are any defects, because we can't watch every second of the uploaded videos to check them!

Deryck

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