[Freeform-dev] Re: [Imc-ithaca] Re: proposal for media.py

[Brian Szymanski]

> I agree, if we had a case where 64k wavs were something we'd expect to
> be uploaded then it'd make sense to support server-side encoding,
> however, a 64k wav recorded mono 16bit 44100 is less than a second
> (88244 bytes a second, or 86k/sec).  So calculate it out, a 10 second
> wav is 860k.. one minute of audio is about 5megs, 10 minutes 50megs, and

I'm not sure who would use such a high encoding rate for non-studio
recordings (ie, likely just speech). I'd expect people to record at more
like 1/4-1/5th of your figure (and we can provide explicit instructions on
how to convert - with Windows/unix it's simple, I'd imagine it is with Mac
as well). This way, 1-5 minutes of audio is between 1-5megs, which is much
more reasonable, and not going to kill us at all (in terms of bandwidth,
performance, or quality).

> Also, the older machines sitting down at SeeSpot won't be able to do it
> "realtime" either, they'll have to record, edit, encode, then send.. if
> it's done right our mod'd version of DropOgg will send as it's
> encoding, to save time.

I think you're getting ahead of yourself here... You're talking about
integrating a recording, encoding, and uploading system?

> However, because this greatly improves upload time it'd make it much
> less "tech elitist" for people with slower net connections... there are
> far more people with newer machines using dialup than there are people
> using older machines which won't be able to encode audio.  OggDrop is
> currently available for MacOS 8.6+, MacOS X, and Windows.  I'm quite
> suprised that someone hasn't made a GNU/Linux version - it'd be pretty
> easy to throw one together.  All in all, I think if someone can figure
> out how to aquire the audio, use an audio editor, etc they should be
> able to figure out how to drag and drop it into little the fishy window
> that appears when they click "Post Multimedia" (or "Add Multimedia"
> while posting an article). :-)

Not everyone is going to be using an audio editor. As for the acquiring,
you'd be surprised how simple it can be made.

I guess my basic point is that the uploading is only made once, and the
playing many times. So we shouldn't worry too much about wasting a few
cycles on the uploading, in the Freeform way of looking at things, it
doesn't cost much to add some oggencode support on the server and let the
occasional big wave come through, even when we have explicit instructions
how to use oggdrop.

Peace,
Brian