Re: [Debconf-video] One proposal about debconf16 videos

[Wouter Verhelst <w@uter.be>]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 09:58:59PM +0900, HAYASHI Kentaro wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> First, thank you for great work - recording many sessions by debconf video
> team.
> I can watch them after debconf16. :-)

Indeed :-)

> By the way, there are many sessions and many recorded one with high quality,
> but it requires enough bandwidth to watch them or download them.
> low quality version of video optionally.
> 
> To talk about this topic, I tried to some experimental conversion.
> 
> Here is the command line to play with it:
>   ffmpeg -i original.webm converted.webm
> 
> This executes conversion from vp8 & vorbis to vp9 & opus.

While losing some quality in the process. If we were to transcode to
VP9, it would be done from the source files, not from the currently
produced files.

I did consider creating VP9/Opus WebM files of all the talks before
debconf and debcamp, but I decided not to, in the end:

- The support for VP9 in stable is limited. GStreamer doesn't have it
  yet, and I believe that most browsers don't, either. mplayer certainly
  doesn't, and you may have issues with VLC. There are other such
  problems. In all, it's too soon to drop VP8 (although adding VP9 could
  certainly work).
- Since our encoder runs stable (and I have no intention of having it
  run unstable or testing), that means the lack of good VP9 support in
  stable is a bit of a blocker, too.
- Veyepar (our review and transcoding system) has support for
  transcoding to multiple file formats, but they're distinguished by
  extension name, nothing more. I could probably hack it up so that it
  would support more than one WebM output file, but I didn't have the
  time to get that up and running during debcamp. Without such support,
  I had to choose between VP8 and VP9. Given the above two, the choice
  for VP8 is obvious.
- While having smaller files for similar quality is useful, I'm not
  convinced that producing low-quality versions of video files is still
  very useful in this day and age.

It's certainly on my TODO list to look at producing VP9/Opus files for
next year, but I am of the opinion that this year is too soon.

*maybe* I'll get the necessary stuff installed on vittoria in a week or
two, make a few changes, and encode everything a second time to
VP9/Opus. This is not a promise, however, and depends highly on whether
it's reasonably doable to get VP9/Opus encoding to work on Jessie
without too much issues or backports.

-- 
< ron> I mean, the main *practical* problem with C++, is there's like a dozen
       people in the world who think they really understand all of its rules,
       and pretty much all of them are just lying to themselves too.
 -- #debian-devel, OFTC, 2016-02-12