LFNW2010

About the LFNW Videos

I just wanted to post a little background about the videos I recorded from LFNW 2010.

I recorded them with a Samsung SC-MX20 which is a very inexpensive / budget rig. The sound quality is fair to good considering the camera does not have the ability to use an external mic. The video quality is fair to good considering that most of the rooms had the lights turned off for viewing projected presentation slides. The videos are unedited and I did not bother to even add title slides mainly because I wanted to stick with Linux apps for production and I have yet to find a reasonable video editor. Yes, I've tried them all and they either have issues with audio export or want to transcode the video resolution to something other than the original size.

The videos were recorded at 720x480 resolution and where transcoded with a combination of Handbrake and ffmpeg2theora... with the final results being in Ogg Theora (.ogv) format.

The videos were uploaded to archive.org and are streaming (and downloadable) from there.

In the HTML 5 video tag I used to embed the videos I used a resolution of 512x288 to avoid forcing horizontal scrolling. Starting with the 3.6 series of Firefox you can play videos full-screen but it is recommended that you simply right-click on the videos and "Save Video As..." to download a local copy and user your preferred video player for best performance and quality.

For those with browsers that don't support the HTML 5 video tag nor Ogg Theora video, you are out of luck. Feel free to download the individual files and play them back with VLC.


Video: LFNW2010 - Linux Server Hardening

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Linux Server Hardening Tips and Techniques by Gary Smith.

Video: LFNW2010 - RHEL Automation with SystemBuilder

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Automating Configuration, Deployment and Maintenance for Red Hat and CentOS by Kay Williams from Rendition Software.

Video: LFNW2010 - Hack this Site

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Hack this Site or Learn How Anyway by Andrew Becherer.

Video: LFNW2010 - Fedora 13 Sneak Peek

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What's under the hat? A sneak peek at Fedora 13 by Jesse Keating.

Video: LFNW2010 - Don't Custom Build that Site!

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Don't custom build that site! The many uses for Drupal by Jakob Perry.

Video: LFNW2010 - Git er done with GIT

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Here's the video of Jesse Keating's introduction to git.

Video: LFNW2010 - Intro to SELinux, Part 2

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This is is the second hour of the two hour Intro to SELinux presentation by Hal Pomeranz.

Please note, my battery died with about 10 minutes to go so the last bit of the presentation is missing. Sorry!

Video: LFNW2010 - Intro to SELinux, Part 1

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This is is the first hour of the two hour Intro to SELinux presentation by Hal Pomeranz.

LinuxFest Northwest 2010 Day 1 (late)

Day 1 went very well. The presenters of all of the presentations I went to allowed me to record their presentations... and as in previous years, I plan on sharing those with everyone. I have a problem though... and that is with transcoding the videos.

My family bought a new video camera for Xmas - a Samsung SC-MX20. I'll admit it, we bought it because it was inexpensive. I read the reviews of it before I bought it and I was very aware of the issues I was going to have with it. I have run into one problem that I have yet to be able to resolve... but first a little background. This camera records to an SDcard in .mp4 format. I had not previously had any problems transcoding MP4 video with mencoder, ffmpeg, ffpmeg2theora... but for some reason the .mp4 files created by this camera confuse every piece of transcoding software I've tried. How? At second 2186 some property of the video changes and just break the transcoder. Unfortunately I don't have the error messages in front of me so I'm going to be quite vague. mencoder doesn't freak out but when it hits second 2186 I start to see a lot of duplicate frame messages... which is usually no problem because I see that a lot in various videos I've converted. In this case however, the output video mencoder creates freezes on the last frame although the audio continues just fine. I even tried iMovie on an iMac and it flat out crashed when it it hit second 2186.

At first I thought it was a filesystem problem or a corrupted filesystem on the SDcard. But I've allowed the camera to format every card I've used, I've used multiple cards by different vendors, and I've used multiple computers... and every video that is longer than 2186 has encountered this problem. I'm baffled. I've done some Internet searches but so far they have come up empty.

What's odd is that the original .mp4 video files playback just fine... I'm just having a problem transcoding them. So the worst case scenario is that I have to distribute the very big .mp4 files. I do have one strategy left to try and that is to use Handbrake and convert them to another .mp4 file and try to transcode that. I haven't had time to do that yet but at this point I'm crossing my fingers and hopes that works. If I can't find a solution to this problem, I'm definitely going to have to buy another camera. For videos shorter than that, no problem. I guess while recording I could hit stop and start every 30 minutes but that is very error prone.

I didn't have much time to proof read this so sorry for any typos!


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