After some issues with the US Post Office, I received the PyCon Video data in the mail today from LD ‘Gus’ Landis. He and Bill Chipman took on the task of video taping as much of the PyCon 2007 conference as they could. They worked with Jeff Rush (Co-Chair and in charge of the audio feed recordings), and the entire audio team co-ordinated by Carl Karsten, to provide the world with this information; using their personal video equipment. Gus has already ripped all the video into a common format and generated a preliminary index of the data denoting the date and first talk on the file, each file ~1GB in size (THANK YOU!!!!). Over the next 4 days I will get a full index made and flesh out the preliminary production schedule. (Yes this includes multiple open source, linux friendly formats.)


There were technical difficulties. The audio recording boxes ran into some problems and much of the audio was lost. This is not a serious problem as we can use the audio from the video. Some of the video also appears to have some audio degradation. This is primarily due to issues with gain and clipping. I will be working with Jeff Rush to pick the best audio from the union, and use the best where ever possible. The Robert M. “r0ml” Lefkowitz Keynote video looks fantastic with no audio problems. There were also some suprize treats included which I was not expecting. This is going to be fun!

We were hoping to include hosting on YouTube or Google Video, but the licensing agreements for those sites are incompatible with the release forms. One of the reasons for wanting this hosting (in addition to other higher quality downloads) was so that the video could be integrated into the schedule application, and for the added exposure. The current release forms give non-transferable distribution rights to the PSF, and the presenters and/or their employers retain the copyright, full distribution, and licensing rights. We have not yet ruled out getting additional release forms signed which would allow for giving redistribution and relicensing rights to google. At a minimum some options will be added to the 2008 release forms. It is still under discussion on whether this will come in the form of a Creative Commons Share-A-Like License, and more general transferable redistribution license, or one specific to a hosting service or services.