writeups

Fri Jun 18 13:42:26 PDT 2004

> MBONE *is* more modern.

Well, multicast is certainly more efficient, and I wish these "radio 
stations", et al, would or could figure that out.  But MBONE per se seems 
to be dead, or so I have heard, it being replaced by (unicast) things like 
NetMeeting, or whatever.

We should adopt (if wistfully) whatever means will reach the most of the 
kind of people we want to serve.  If this means non-real-time video stored 
for posterity, fetchable by members[1] in several formats, that's dandy. 
We have all the technology, but no one has _quite_ put all the pieces 
together.

Before I was elected to the board, I was very active as the de-facto "video 
committee": I bought a camcorder and wireless mics and associated giblets, 
put them in a Pelican case to make it easy to tote, and kept it supplied 
with blank tape. (8mm analog NTSC, but at the time it was cool.)  The tapes 
still exist, many of them (the Pelican case does, too), and want only 
conversion to another format for better distribution.  (Before that, 
another set of active volunteers -- Greg Kulosa, among them -- drove the 
process of doing live video over the MBONE.  That could likewise be 
restarted, with much cooler hardware these days as a bonus.)

This takes time and/or money, and somehow this is where the matter has lain 
for about 7 years.  All it needs is one more active volunteer to run the 
next leg of the race.  You up for it?  Someone?  Anyone with a modern 
Powerbook can do this easily.  (My PowerBook is 4 years old, and I live in 
Minnesota, so I recuse myself this time. :-)

I have to reiterate, though, that the information content of these tapes, 
or any videotape of someone talking to a bunch of slides, is remarkably 
small, even if someone manned the camera (which we don't).  Video may be 
cool, but the audio and the slides would in fact be more than adequate. 
Add a good, written summary, and you've got almost the whole experience. 
If we do want to do video, I submit that it can be compressed to within an 
inch of its life  -- I'm thinking 1fps or less.

--

[1] Identified by a password kept in ... a database!  We keep coming back 
to this. :)