Video: 5 Fun Things in Fedora 12

[Máirín Duffy]

On Mon, 2009-11-30 at 15:12 -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 2009/11/30 Máirín Duffy <mairin at linuxgrrl.com>:
> > Hi,
> > I just posted a 15 minute 'fun things in Fedora' video. It's on YouTube
> > - I tried blip.tv and the upload kept stalling, so I split the video in
> > to and got it up on YouTube just so I could make it available more
> > quickly.
> >
> > http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/5-fun-things-in-fedora-12-video/
> > Hope you enjoy,
> 
> Unfortunately, one of the five fun things is not watching the five fun
> things videos in a stock fedora install.

To be fair, the video is aimed at people who are not yet using Fedora.

> The site requires flash.
> 
> …  If anyone doing fedora marketing wants to put up videos that don't
> require proprietary software to view, please feel free to drop me an
> email. I'd be glad to help, or if I'm too busy I can connect you
> with someone else willing and able to help.
> 
> Supporting open video technology isn't especially hard, and it doesn't
> require losing compatibility with people still on proprietary platforms.
> ... though it is a little more involved than just dropping the videos
> on youtube.

I hope you didn't mean to hurt my feelings with your message because it
could certainly be interpreted that way.

As noted, the videos were created in Fedora 12 using PiTiVi. I attempted
to encode them 3 times, for a total of 3 hours rendering time (I let the
last one render overnight last night since I had wasted hours already)
using an Ogg container, Theora video codecs, and Vorbis & Celt sound
codecs. Every single time, the video rendered completely out-of-sync.
Even though gstreamer was used to render it, it refused to play in
gstreamer players, only playing in mplayer.

I finally had to render it using an avi container / mpeg2 / mp3, and
that only took 15 minutes to render.

I attempted to upload it to blip.tv at first, as I already noted, and
after 2 failed attempts (a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes of my time) I
gave up and had it uploaded to YouTube in 30 minutes. Whenever I have to
upload something to YouTube, I always make an ogv version available (you
can see in my past blog posts where I've done this) but in this case it
simply was not possible as it would not encode successfully.

You can ask anyone who knows me - I am insanely religious about software
freedom and codec freedom. After spending hours filming, editing,
rendering, and uploading these video (I would guesstimate about 12 hours
total, during my holiday vacation time) I became impatient and just
wanted to share the video instead of putting myself through continued
pain trying to do it the right way.

Can you help me get this working with ogg & blip.tv? Is there a bug in
PiTiVi or F12's theora / ogg / celt / vorbis encoders that resulted in
my having such a poor experience? What do you suggest? I used all of the
default settings in PiTiVi as I wasn't sure what encoder settings to
tweak (and at ~1 hour rendering time per attempt making wild guesses
would not be a prudent usage of my time.) 

~m