baylisa video streaming (was Re: writeups)

Sat Jun 19 12:00:06 PDT 2004

Rich,

This is a good point, and it may be time to revisit it.

A number of years ago, when the economy was high and BayLISA was a lot
more visible at the LISA conferences, the Board was offered a donation
of a NetApp file server by Network Appliance (1998-1999ish).

At the time, feelings were quite ambivalent-- some folks were all for
it, others thought it might put us over the limit of what we could
legally intake for donations for a calendar year, etc.  An idea was
floated that what we could use that space for would be to digitize the
BayLISA video library and make it available to members for download.
Whether our volunteer hosting at the time had the bandwidth to support
that was another question, but we knew we could get creative with
throttling and took the next step to raise the question.

To our surprise, quite a number of our past speakers objected strongly
to this idea.  Even though their talks may not have been precisely the
same as their tutorials, several said that having their material out
for download would ultimately spread it far enough that it would impact
their ability to make a living.  Others indicated that they expressed
strong opinions or undiplomatic truths in their presentations, and that
while they were comfortable with being a part of the video library,
they too had concerns about the ability of digital media to spread far
and wide.

Recently we've talked about making BayLISA videos available to the
Computer History Museum.  One of our members is involved with the Museum
and thinks they could arrange to have the Museum digitize the videos
onto DVDs and add them to the Museum library.  We'd like to see that
done, but need to get details finalized, including an inventory of
all the videos on hand and a mechanism to get release forms to the
speakers for yea/nay decisions on permission.  We'd have to rely on
the honor system for folks not to digitally share these files-- though
nowadays, anyone with a Tivo or ReplayTV or homebrew video capture
setup could do the same with the video tapes.

I'm told that the current video library occupies something like 16
cubic feet, and that since we let our storage unit drop to save funds,
it's hosted at the video librarian's home or garage.  Certainly putting
things on DVD would help with storage space, as well as being a format
more affordably mailable to remote members.

So clearly this is something that we need to get working on again.

cheers,
Strata

Rich Holland wrote:
> ...
> So while the MBONE may still be useful and nifty, I'd *still* like to see
> something downloadable; it shouldn't be hard to run the camera into a splitter,
> sending one signal to the VHS and another to a video capture card capable of
> recording an MPEG-4 stream...  *THAT* is something I'd pay $35/year for, since
> I can't show up at meetings anymore.
> 
> Rich

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Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
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