Video Archiving Championship 2010

[Greg Marra]

Hi everyone,

The Championship is a week away, and it doesn't appear that the community has worked out how to video archive those matches! I'd hate for highest quality play of 2010 to get lost forever.

Does anyone know if FIRST will be making field-side AV boxes available for video recording?

Also, does anyone have a good technical solution to record the webcasts? If we can get people to record webcasts we can split the matches up afterwards and get the entire Championship online.

I personally am not attending the Championship this year, so I won't be of much help in that regard. I know we can work together and come up with a way to make sure all that video gets saved to somebody's hard disk!

Any ideas?

[BrendanB]

This is sort of related to this topic, but I was wondering why last year the Galileo and Curie division audio was messed up. Didn't know if someone set it up wrong, but didn't know if that could be fixed for this year. If not, the video itself is great to have and thanks to those who have put the time and effort into the TBA!

If someone needs a hand in dealing with Archimedes, I might be able to help if needed depending on my roles in Atlanta and availability during competition, but I would like to learn how to set up recording and possibly webcasts (then again NASA most likely has that down).

[Jeff 801]

I can record if
A) I know where to get a feed
B) have time each day to get the equipment set up
C) A Windows Media Center capture is a fine formate

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Jeff 801

I can record if
B) have time each day to get the equipment set up

If you need help with this I can do it. Goes for everyone, really, I just don't have any equipment myself.

[SentientCitrus]

I'll be recording Curie in h264 from the stands.

[Alex Cormier]

Originally Posted by SentientCitrus

I'll be recording Curie in h264 from the stands.

Hopefully they will put up the high quality videos you give them this time.

[Joe Ross]

Didn't I read somewhere that TBA has Pinnacle video recorders that sometimes get shipped to events. Will they be at the championship?

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

Hopefully they will put up the high quality videos you give them this time.

Are we missing some video? You sound like we've overlooked something. Can you PM me and let me know what's up?

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

Didn't I read somewhere that TBA has Pinnacle video recorders that sometimes get shipped to events. Will they be at the championship?

I think we will be able to get one of our two there, but won't really have anyone to operate it. Are the video recording stations down on the field? Is there someone who can volunteer to record one of the fields that won't otherwise get recorded? Maybe and Einstein? PM me.

[SentientCitrus]

Greg, I think he was referring to the downsampling/re-encoding of the videos from ROC, which I didn't have an opportunity to do before handing them off. If you can give me a target resolution and rough filesize, I can try to tweak x264 encoder parameters to optimize the video for the high level of motion and run a batch job to re-encode everything while I'm gone...

I'd be apt to just record straight to a more web-friendly resolution to begin with, but it really is a thing of beauty to be able to distinguish robot features smaller than, say, a foot across during strategy meetings, which just wasn't possible with "SD" resolutions.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by SentientCitrus

I'd be apt to just record straight to a more web-friendly resolution to begin with, but it really is a thing of beauty to be able to distinguish robot features smaller than, say, a foot across during strategy meetings, which just wasn't possible with "SD" resolutions.

Yea, I totally agree. I don't want to hijack the thread here, but we'd love to be able to host and serve full resolution videos, but we're starting to run out of disk space and need to think about how long it will take people to buffer the videos. We're looking into some solutions for next year, but for now we've got what we've got.

[IKE]

I have a pinnacle, cables, and hardrive. I updated the latest firmware update I could find, but I am having issues viewing the files with Vista. I will bring this along, and maybe someone a bit more tech savy can help. We will be on Archimedes.

[user0]

Team 461 has enough cameras to cover Newton. Out of the 4 cameras we own, we plan to have one watching the field at all times. We have the ability to capture all of the video. But, it might take some time to get all of the video up on the web.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by IKE

I have a pinnacle, cables, and hardrive. I updated the latest firmware update I could find, but I am having issues viewing the files with Vista.

It had never crossed my mind that there might be a firmware update at all! Do the files open with something like VLC?

Bugfix: Only single file up to 4GB captured during longtime-overnight capture using iPod classic 80G

That sounds pretty useful! I've always stopped and restarted recordings to prevent hitting the 4gb FAT32 limit, but maybe the Pinnacle handles it on its own now?

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Does anyone know if FIRST will be making field-side AV boxes available for video recording?

Yup, according to the Essential Information document (under "Video Recording Hookups"). There will be a table near the wall that is between the seats and the dome floor.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Yup, according to the Essential Information document (under "Video Recording Hookups"). There will be a table near the wall that is between the seats and the dome floor.

Great! Now we just need to find people who are planning to record these streams!

Originally Posted by Jeff 801

C) A Windows Media Center capture is a fine formate

We're trying to move towards h264, but WMV beats nothing!