This sounds great! It’s awesome to see so many others interested. We've been planning for quite some time to release a guide on how SOAPify your local regional some time after kickoff and before the regionals, and hopefully this sparked interest will help us speed up the process.
Just to clarify a few things from the SOAP side...
At each regional we attend, we receive an A/V feed from FIRST, encode each match individually, and then upload them to the site after each match. Last year we encoded the VCU Regional as training for new SOAP members, as it was on the Saturday before our first regional.
We also did the webcast for NASA at the Palmetto Regional, which was relatively easy because the computer used for that purpose did not have to be constantly monitored. I suppose if you were just getting started with this, an archived webcast would be they way to go, yet parsing would still need to be done.
Although encoding only takes 1 person per regional, the tedious start, stop, rename, upload, process required us to work in shifts throughout the weekend to prevent us from collapsing in front of the computer after 20 or so matches. And the Championships are a completely different story...
On the idea about some sort of program to encode and parse the videos, it has been considered before, but we ran into a few concerns. If each match went perfectly with no redos or resets or glitches, the software should work perfectly, but it becomes difficult when a match needs to be reset, or may even be rescheduled for a later time (this was a problem even with human encoders and caused a bit of confusion). I'm not saying it can't be done, but those are just some things to keep in mind.
Hopefully with proper implementation, the whole FIRST community will finally be able to see those classic GTR and other powerhouse regional matches that everyone raves about.
-No L