On 8/25/06, Austin Hair adhair@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.
As someone who lives in the US I can not legally use the free software MP3 software.
Most of the Wikimania audio on the site (http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Archives) is only available in MP3, and the few vorbis files available that I've heard are very low quality (due to transcoding a lower quality MP3 into a lower quality Ogg).
It is my understanding that the person who did the Ogg streaming at WM2005 (which worked brilliantly) had offered his services at WM2006, but I'm not sure what happened.
We have people in our community who have experience with large scale streaming and media events using both free software and proprietary software... I'm not sure why we seem to be doing such a poor job delegating.
As we've seen with the (lack of) success with today's skypecast, simply using whatever proprietary toys we have laying on our desks is probably not a good solution.