Coordinated Regional Video Archiving..

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Rob2713g

I'd be interested for the VCU Regional - I'll ask my team.

Someone may be able to write a program to parse the video into matches. For example, based on the beginning buzzer, a certain screen, or something else. Not sure exactly how to do it, but I'm sure there are a bunch of really good programming people in FIRST who could figure it out.

I'll ask the programmers on my team on Monday about parsing.

I believe that 108 already SOAPs VCU (they have in the past anyway), but since they are attending NJ in week 1 this year, we may need it.

[Alex Burman]

My team may be able to provide recordings for NJ (if soap doesn't do it) and Chesapeake. Anyone going down to Brazil?

[Manoel]

Originally Posted by Alex Burman

My team may be able to provide recordings for NJ (if soap doesn't do it) and Chesapeake. Anyone going down to Brazil?

I think we can handle it!

[Joel J]

Not committing anyone, just getting a sense of what events may be covered.

BAE SYSTEMS Granite State Regional 	- J. Norris
NASA / VCU Regional 			- Rob2713g
New Jersey Regional 			- Alex Burman
Pacific Northwest Regional 		- M. Krass
St. Louis Regional 			- 
Arizona Regional 			- Donut
Bayou Regional				- DeepWater
Brazilian Pilot 			- Manoel
Finger Lakes Regional 			- Koko Ed
Florida Regional 			- 
Great Lakes Regional 			- SAV1337
Los Angeles Regional 			- 
Pittsburgh Regional 			- Noah K.
Wisconsin Regional 			- Kevin K
Boilermaker Regional 			- Mike AA
Chesapeake Regional 			- Alex Burman
Detroit Regional 			- 
Greater Kansas City Regional 		- 
Midwest Regional 			- 
Peachtree Regional 			- 
Silicon Valley Regional 		- 
UTC Connecticut Regional 		- 
New York City Regional 			- Noah K.
Boston Regional 			- 
Buckeye Regional 			- Koko Ed
San Diego Regional 			- 
Waterloo Regional 			- J. Norris, SAV1337
GM/Technion Israel Regional 		- 
Colorado Regional 			- 
Davis Sacramento Regional 		- 
Greater Toronto Regional 		- J. Norris, SAV1337
Las Vegas Regional 			- 
Lone Star Regional 			- 
Palmetto Regional 			- 
Philadelphia Regional 			- 
SBPLI Long Island Regional 		- 
West Michigan Regional			- Mike AA

[Mike AA]

I plan to record both Boilermaker and west michigan and if we get there Nationals all to DVD. I bought 2 DVD recorders last spring and I hope to get another 4-6 this year so that I can have redundancy, expecially since last year I was unplugged a time or two and lost about 3 hours of videos.

I had started to work on parsing the videos last year but my job got very busy. I should have more initiative and time to do it this year. So cound me for Boilermaker and Westmichigan. If I get my recorder card I will also bring my computer to do a webcast.

-Mike
1654 last year
2015 this year

[Jonathan Norris]

Personally I don't think recording is the biggest issue, getting it posted on the web in a central location is even more key. I was thinking we could try and bug Brandon to add a function to CD Media that would let us post links to youtube or google videos. I really think this would be the best option, seeing that the videos are not hosted here (bandwidth!) and they are accessible to everyone. I have been playing around with flash video lately (here) and really love it, but I still feel youtube and/or google video embedded in a CD Media page would be best.

[Kevin Kolodziej]

Even if it means I have to get a new VCR (my current one likes to eat tapes) and a second hard drive (for parsing), I'll take care of Wisconsin. No promises on the parsing, though, since that is about the time when my Master's Capstone project will kick into high gear. Raw footage is definitely covered though!

[Noah Kleinberg]

Originally Posted by Joel J.

Not committing anyone, just getting a sense of what events may be covered.

If I can get the equipment required (just a VCR?), I'll record New York City and Pittsburgh... If someone else is going to one of these and has a DVD recorder though then that's probably easier to get it onto a computer.

[technoL]

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

[Madison]

My team will record PNW if someone agrees to remind me about two days before the event starts There's otherwise no way on Earth I'll remember to find and bring along a VCR.

[Joel J]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Norris

Personally I don't think recording is the biggest issue, getting it posted on the web in a central location is even more key. I was thinking we could try and bug Brandon to add a function to CD Media that would let us post links to youtube or google videos. I really think this would be the best option, seeing that the videos are not hosted here (bandwidth!) and they are accessible to everyone. I have been playing around with flash video lately (here) and really love it, but I still feel youtube and/or google video embedded in a CD Media page would be best.

Jon,

I just started to think about implementation details, and that suggestion is a really good one to consider. Does YouTube or Google Video allow downloads of video to a user's hard drive?

I think getting the regionals recorded deserves just as much attention as getting the video parsed into individual matches and put online (though the parsing is alot more tedious). Every step has to be executed for this to work.

I'm also hoping FIRST's scoring system is working by week one, so that we could possibly nag them about getting a copy of the scoring database, to pull match information from. Then things will really start to come together, you know? If they don't provide the database, then there is always the online match results to use (still counts on data availability from day one). Ugh, then there is also the matter of robot information, and robot pictures, but I'm taking this thing one step at a time. (Actually, I think getting robot pictures may be easy, as I notice there are always a few people that upload robot pictures onto CD-Media that they took for scouting purposes).

Anyway, back to the video feed talk .

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Joel J.

I just started to think about implementation details, and that suggestion is a really good one to consider. Does YouTube or Google Video allow downloads of video to a user's hard drive?

Yes, but I think it's only if it's not copyrighted. I noticed some videos on Google Video allow downloads, while others don't.

[Mike AA]

If I could get donations to install a T-3 to my house for 3 months I could host the files with more bandwidth than I already have. Currently I have all the files soap does and plan to in each year to come but I dont have nearly the speed to make it easy for downloads. I may talk to my ISP about getting my SDSL speed upped for the season...

-Mike

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Joel J.

I just started to think about implementation details, and that suggestion is a really good one to consider. Does YouTube or Google Video allow downloads of video to a user's hard drive?

They don't using standard software, but I know there is an add-on for Firefox that allows you to download streaming videos from YouTube, Google, etc. The only catch is that they download in .flv format, and there isn't an .flv player for OSX that I know of, so us Mac users would either have to run bootcamp or be happy streaming.

[Joel J]

Ah.. so YouTube or Google video would be good as a complement, but should not be used as the main repository for storing all the regional video. I wonder what SOAP thinks about all of this? I would think they'd be happy to get all the regionals archived on their site. Maybe I should ask them.