Archiving Recorded Regionals 2008

[Arefin Bari]

I will bring this up at our next meeting, but I am guessing that 108 will be recording the regionals they are attending being New Jersey regional and Florida regional. Please wait for a response from me or Matt Keller in this thread before you put 108 down for any regional or championship. Thanks.

[Jonathan Norris]

Originally Posted by blakcheez

I prefer to disagree to the pro-WMV argument. It is a dying format, more and more players support MP4 well, than Windows Media.

I would have to agree that WMV is a dying format, however .h264 recording is just not feasible at this point because of how processor intensive it is (you need a beast of a computer to do live .h264 recording). but quicktime .mp4 is not nearly as processor intensive, i'll do some tests and research in the next couple weeks and provide some recommendations for recording directly to a computer (hopefully with .mp4).

[synth3tk]

Although if someone CAN get something running .h264 recording please please PLEASE share it with us. I just want to see what a match would look like.

Anyway, what equipment do you all use besides VCR/DVD recording from the main feed? We have a Sony Handycam DRC-DVD300 and a JVC compact VHS camcorder. I've got Vegas on a mediocre laptop, and at the school's computer lab there is a machine with Vegas that's nicer than mine.

[notaPINKtruck]

I want to echo the standard format/naming conventions. It's a nightmare to put the videos in a database/retrieval system when you have to rename them. Last year was somewhat-standardized, but there were some lapses (which are time-consuming).

...

Originally Posted by blakcheez

Something to think about as far as bandwidth goes, but how complex would it be to get teams with massive amounts of excess webspace and bandwidth to host their own videos and maybe other area teams, then get these sites to link to them?

Well I can't speak for folks from TBA or SOAP, but it wouldn't be too hard to implement a system commonly used for open source software distribution that goes like this: on the back end, any number of web/FTP servers mirror the same file tree, usually through automatic synchronization. On the front-end, knowing who has what files, you use some scripting to randomly send each downloader to a different one of your mirrors.

It's essentially a form of load-balancing.

There's also bittorrent to consider, but you'd have to bundle match files and get a good swarm going for it to be effective. That totally eliminates the strength of the current system which allows you to select individual matches, but some do want ALL of them, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to parallel the web hosting with a torrent tracker for people who want whole regionals.

...

I'd love to help the recording efforts but I'm usually way too busy during competition. I'll see if I get one of our members or parents to do the HI regional and let you know.

If you ever got a mirroring system up I'd be willing to offer up some of our storage/bandwidth to help out. We have way more than we'll ever need.

[synth3tk]

That load-balancing type solution you mentioned wouldn't be a bad idea. If we could get TBA, SOAP, FIRSTvideoArchive.com, along with teams/people willing to pitch in then that would be something to consider. That's only if it's really needed. Personally, I think it should be implemented anyway, that way it's already there if something happens.

As for the Bittorrent, we could offer the seeds by regional. So all of FLR would be one file, Buckeye in another, etc. Championship would be a different story.

[artdutra04]

Having everything encoded using h.264 or MPEG-4 is definitely my preferred choice for all the match videos. I personally use h.264 now for all my edited video that makes its way online, because it's a superior and much more versatile codec than WMV.

Also, if anyone needs another mirror for the videos online, I have half a terabyte of storage space and five terabytes a month of bandwidth at my disposal.

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

MP4 is fine on our side. (In fact, it's much better. Hopefully when flash 9 is polished we can do away with FLV's)

It will take more resources for compression, though. We are battling an h264 encoding problem at the moment. Does anyone know a good way to compress this stuff in real time?

Just use a hardware h.264 encoder, like this:

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/main...oduct1.en.html

Originally Posted by notaPINKtruck

h.264 is really processor intensive both on the compression and playback ends, and it's definitely not designed for real-time encoding (at least by anybody other than DirecTV and the likes). I don't think you're going to get good performance unless you buy a specialized encoder card or have a REALLY high end system.

While I agree that the h.264 codec is intensive on the encoding side, it's not so much on the playback side. I can play movies encoded in h.264 at HDTV (720p) settings just fine on my two-year-old 1.4Ghz Celeron laptop with 1.25Gb RAM and an integrated graphics card. And since I doubt that the match video would be encoded at such a high resolution and bit-rate, any computer made in the five or so years should play h.264 video just fine.

And on the encoding front, it's a lot easier just to bring along a massive eSATA or Firewire external hard drive, and capture all your video as uncompressed DV. Then, chop up the video in a video editing program, and again export each match as uncompressed DV. Then when you have a huge playlist of videos, use a batch conversion program (SUPER Media Convertor works for this, and it's free) and just let it run overnight.

Also, if you just play the video using VLC Media Player, MPlayer, or Media Player Classic, it will play a lot faster and smoother than with Quicktime.

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Also, if you just play the video using VLC Media Player, MPlayer, or Media Player Classic, it will play a lot faster and smoother than with Quicktime.

linkified:

VLC: http://www.videolan.org
MPlayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
Media Player Classic: http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ckage_id=84358

[Jonathan Norris]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Just use a hardware h.264 encoder, like this:

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/main...oduct1.en.html

That little hardware encoder looks very nice, I may have to pick one up (if I can wrangle up the funds...). I'll also experiment a bit with just using quicktime Pro to record directly to the computer, see if I can get stable recording in .h64 at something like 640X480 and at least 1.5 mbps.

I think we should recommend people try and use .h264, but I don't think everyone will. Maybe we should just stay with the quicktime .mp4 format (which still looks great, and is less processor intensive)

[synth3tk]

That seems like a pretty cool device, but none of us are fotunate enough to own a MacBook. The price tag is fine for me. If there's some type of PC alternative please share it with us.

[Madison]

We will record both the Oregon Regional and the Microsoft/Seattle Regional.

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by blakcheez

That seems like a pretty cool device, but none of us are fotunate enough to own a MacBook. The price tag is fine for me. If there's some type of PC alternative please share it with us.

I just linked to the Mac one, because most of elgato's hardware gets very good reviews.

There are also h.264 hardware encoders available for Windows. Here's one from Best Buy:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=10-64531371-2

[Kevin Kolodziej]

I'll cover WI again this year. I'll make sure to do some recording on Thursday to make sure the audio is correct this year, and let them know if they need to fix it for Friday/Saturday. I may not have the time to parse this year, but we'll cross that bridge after March 15th.

[Jonathan Norris]

Here is an updated list of volunteers, apparently I cannot edit the other one now.

Regional                                         Volunteer
Suffield Shakedown
Rochester Rally
Week 1
BAE Systems Granite State Regional 
Midwest Regional 
New Jersey Regional 
Oregon Regional                                 Madison Krass (M. Krass, team 488)
St. Louis Regional 
Week 2
Arizona Regional 
Finger Lakes Regional                           Ed Patterson (Koko Ed, team 191)
Greater Kansas City Regional
NASA / VCU Regional                             Anish (aksimhal, team 1123)
San Diego Regional                              AJ (ay2b, team 980)
Week 3
Boilermaker Regional                            Mike Aalderink (mike AA, team 2015)
Brazil Regional 
Chesapeake Regional 
Connecticut Regional 
Detroit Regional 
Florida Regional 
Peachtree Regional 
Pittsburgh Regional 
Silicon Valley Regional                         AJ (ay2b, team 980)
Wisconsin Regional                              Kevin Kolodziej  (team 1675)
Week 4
Buckeye Regional                                David Thomas (blakcheez, team 964)
Lone Star Regional                              Kevin Sevcik (team 57)
Los Angeles Regional                            AJ (ay2b, team 980)
Microsoft Seattle Regional                      Madison Krass (M. Krass, team 488)
Oklahoma City Regional 
UC Davis Sacramento Regional 
Waterloo Regional                               Jonathan Norris (team 610)
West Michigan Regional                          Mike Aalderink (mike AA, team 2015)
Israel Regional 
Week 5
Bayou Regional 
Boston Regional                                 Greg Marra (The Blue Alliance)
Colorado Regional 
Great Lakes Regional 
Greater Toronto Regional 
Hawaii Regional 
Las Vegas Regional 
Minnesota Regional 
Palmetto Regional 
Philadelphia Regional
SBPLI Long Island Regional 
New York City Regional

[aksimhal]

Hi!

I noticed that no one has volunteered to record the NASA VCU Regional in Richmond. And since VCU is the only regional 1123 goes to, I am willing to help with the recording process.

Just one small catch: I've never done anything like this before.
So, if anyone could just get me up to speed on what I would need (in terms of hardware/software) that would be great. (I am also willing to partner with some other team too, to make this possible.)

Thanks,

[Kevin Sevcik]

Since LSR is our local regional, I just been dragging a desktop with a Hauppage video in card up to the regional and recording everything on it in a high quality MPG. I might change things up a little this year, but it seems to work well if you can do it. Granted, it's my desktop computer so it precludes me from editing and posting the videos until after the regional, but it works.

I may be able to cover Arizona, since 57 is attending, but if there's a local team that's better able to manage it, that'd probably be smarter. If they can only manage recording, I'd be happy to grab a dump of the video from them on a firewire hard drive and edit and encode everything after the regional.