[Bf-docboard] Education pages - materials

[Thoenes, Michael A]

Ton,
Thanks for tip on VLC player... I will add a link.

I am recording the movies with cam studio ( http://www.rendersoftware.com/products/camstudio/ ) at 640 x 480. My machine will capture 8fps which is more than enough for the training videos and keeps file sizes down. I have all the high res originals and and they are much clearer. My question would be what is a maximum acceptable file size. The 640 x 480 versions are running roughly 4 to 5 times the file size of the 320x240 versions, ie 12MB to 15MB vs. 3 MB. Are 15+ MB files acceptable\preferable the Blender3D.com site or would you like both high res version and low res version.

The figures above are with mpeg-layer3 audio compression. Uncompressed audio with higher quality pushes a 12 MB file into the 30MB range. 30MB files would probably put unnecessary strain on your bandwidth and disc space at blender3D.org.?

Ton wrote: "What's a bit confusing for me is the commercial offering at the site...  
you intend to make all this material available for free download,  
right? As Open Content or so?"

Answer: Not sure what you mean by commercial offering. I do intend for all of it to be offered freely - Open content. I would also be pleased to offer it to the foundation to sell as a disc/DVD if people didn't want to download the high res versions. By the time the class is over, I should quite a collection of training videos.

format conversion is not a big issue. I use virtual dub to do the conversions. 

Michael Thoenes

Reply-To: bf-docboard@blender.org

Hi,

Great work! :)

Here at OSX, the quicktime player only does garbled sound. There's a  
free player for OSX though, VLC, which plays it OK. So you could add a  
link to VLC download:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html
And tell OSXers to load videos to disk first, and play with VLC.

Alternative is Divx, which has a 'validator' program at OSX that makes  
movies playable in OSX too (then still playing correctly at Win).
The status of Linux players is unknown to me.

I would suggest to offer a higher quality video too... if possible. If  
you need assistance for all of this, I can ask around for a volunteer  
to convert them. In what format are the original movies?

What's a bit confusing for me is the commercial offering at the site...  
you intend to make all this material available for free download,  
right? As Open Content or so?

Thanks,

-Ton-
-