Hi Fedora Art list!

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Jan 22, 2008 7:52 AM, Colby Hoke <choke at redhat.com> wrote:
> Thanks to a suggestion from Nicu Buculei, I've joined this list mostly
> out of interest in an Art Studio spin of Fedora. I've been working with
> gdk and jspaleta on getting a Fedora repo-ready version of Kino out
> there for people to make their own videos in the Fedora world.

Now that fedoratv is public knowledge let's take a moment and re-cap
where things stand on what we've been poking at.

Fedoratv needs work, but its basically where we want to drive Fedora
related content as a place to dogfood open codecs associated tools by
generating our own project relevant content. Open media isn't going to
get better until we have a real reason to use it. Fedoratv will be the
open service where the Fedora's media needs will be met.

But Fedoratv is just the service, we also need to make client side
video editting an out-of-box reality. It doesn't have to be perfect,
it just has to be good enough so that people can edit content for
consumption on fedoratv.  Let me explain what we need to be able to
ship out-of-the-box in Fedora on the clientside.
1)reliable dv camera capture for some subset of camera hardware
2)kino as the default dv video editor which can export into ogg theora
video for upload to fedoratv

Okay so where are the problems:
First... firewire and dv cameras.  There have been some technical
problems with the new kernel firewire stack which have seen
improvement in update f8 kernels.
Speaking of which, Colby, does firewire dv capture work for you in the
latest f8 kernels?


A basic stripped down kino which can take raw dv and export to theora
is absolutely doable.
You don't get access to control over interlacing (via gst-ffmpeg
plugin) and other things which semi-profession video people will want.
But for basic community web content, it will export theora with a
vorbis audio stream.  On top of that if ffmpeg is on the system kino
is smart enough to see it and enable more export options.

The only problem is, we've no out-of-the-box way to convert use theora
video clips as source material in kino.  Kino internally uses dv, and
through the magic of ffmpeg it can import other formats and convert
them internally to dv.  The problem is we don't have a Fedora
shippable way to convert theora to dv, as far as I can tell.  And
that's a problem.  It would be extremely useful if people could take
theora screencasts as source material into kino to mix with dv
footage, and re-export as theora again.

Yes, yes.. video purist out there are cringing at the thought of
mixing dv and compressed video, but the goal here is good enough for
fedoratv.. not good enough for professional sport drink commercials.
The state of video is such that we can't wait for a profession quality
open editor tool to fall out of the sky. We have to start here, and
then find people willing to take up the challenge to create the next
generation of open editting tools so we can produce even better
content.

So how do we get theora vids converted to dv for kino to use as source
material? I do not know.  Stripping down a version of ffmpeg as
something shippable in fedora is a near impossible task, and would
require legal review regardless.   I haven't found an existing
gstreamer plugin that lets me do it that could in the future be
promoted to 'good' and shipped in fedora.  So if someone knows a way
to convert theora to dv out-of-the-box in fedora right now, I want to
know how to do it.  Kino lets you add custom import scripts, so once
we have a commandline way to do the conversion, kino gains it as an
import method.

-jef