[Foundation-l] REMINDER: Skypecast - Wikipedia Conversation from Florida

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/25/06, Austin Hair <adhair at 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.