I am pretty sure that videos in .ogg (or another more easily playable format) are going to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons soon. BA is working on it, atm.
In the interim, the videos on the stream can be played using Windows Media Player.
On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 7:07 PM, Walter Vermeir walter@wikipedia.be wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have not been to Wikimania but I do am interested in what was going on there. And probably many people who did go also because you can not go to everything.
120 years ago some clever guy found a solution for exactly this type of problem.
About how this invention was used for the Wikimanias before 2008 have I voiced in my newsletter my opinion last year; http://en.wikizine.org/2007/08/year-2007-week-33-number-79.html
For Wikimania 2008;
There are archived videos online of the sessions. http://webcast.bibalex.org/Home/List.aspx?Conference=6u0LkBzgNlZm+RzGhC/6Ag=...
This is the first Wikimania that this has happened. So far the good news.
The location, Biblotheca Alexandrina, was presented as a very new, very upscale world class and technological advanced location for a conference. Having some expectations that the are able to provide video recordings is not unreasonable.
When I try to watch the video online it just does not work. I use Ubuntu 8.04 / FF3.0
On this blog can be find information about how you can watch the streams; http://linuxawy.org/node/28
... and it works. At least for a while. Then the video stops in the middle of a presentation.
This is a deep url mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-7.wmv
to the board panel session. I was not able to find out how to download it directly. I was able to open it with VLC and dump the file locally and so make a local copy.
This way it was possible to get behind the point where when streaming the video breaks down. It seems that the video contains several points where it is broken. The video stops but the audio keeps running. By running the video forward a bit and back again you can get over the break points.
But even so I was not able to view the whole session because the file at a certain point was empty. The videofile seems to be so bad that even VLC can not swallow it.
That is my user experience of "trying to view the Wikimanina 2008 recordings" for so far.
Why is the WMF again still not able to do what any 12 year old with a mobile phone seems to be able to do these days; make a movie and put it on the internet in way that just works? What is wrong with putting files on an ftp-server and posting the urls?
-- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community