[TBA]: Comprehensive Video Archiving

[StevenB]

Personally, I think it's important to get the videos up as quickly as possible.

If I'm scanning the match scores of an ongoing regional and happen to see a great match that I missed, I immediately want to go look at it on TBA. However, a couple weeks later when the video is finally posted, I just don't have the time or desire to look it up. This would also help scouting teams in their discussions and deliberations Friday night. Who scored in autonomous? What happened to team X in match 42?

Obviously, it's "better late than never", but the Pinnacle box + flash drive solution seems like a rather slow way to get the video: the flash drive gets sent back to TBA (mailed?), Greg uploads the video, someone spends several hours parsing it, and

I would like to see an easy way for matches to be recorded, parsed, and uploaded in real time. I'm hoping to work on something like this over the summer, and possibly give it a test run at one or two off-season events.

The basic idea consists of a PC and a generic USB video capture device. The PC runs software that detects the beginning and end of the matches based on the bell and buzzer sound effects, and parses the video accordingly. Between matches (or in the background, if it's a multi-core machine), the video is compressed and uploaded.

Ideally, there would be a Linux LiveCD and a list of compatible capture devices, such that a user could take any laptop, pop in the CD, plug in a capture device, connect to the Internet, and start sending video directly to TBA.