The Toronto Perl Mongers group is proud to announce the availability of audio recordings of our sessions.

We are providing them:

  1. to share our wealth with the rest of the world, for the benefit of all mankind.
  2. in the hope that more people will come out to our meetings,
  3. encourage other groups to record and share their wealth too.

I also hope to encourage the Perl community to create a central repository where we can all archive this stuff. A place with a lot of disk space, and a lot of bandwidth. If anyone has suggestions, or can volunteer such a web server, let me know.

Also I'd like to get feedback regarding the usefulness, or uselessness of what we are trying to do.
Send your bouquets or brickbats to fhew3 at cogeco dot ca

The URL for the archives is: http://hew.ca/talks_audio/

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Toronto Perl Mongers Audio Archives
by zentara (Cardinal) on Nov 06, 2004 at 11:12 UTC
    I guess you probably know all the details about ogg, but just for the sake of smaller file sizes, I know you can get smaller files with ogg, than using speex, if you input 11025 Khz raw audio and use the -q 0 setting. (For us poor phone line users :-) ) 
    arecord -f S16_LE -c1 -r 11025 -t raw -d 3600 -D hw:0,0 | oggenc -R 11
+025 -C1 -q 0 - | cat > myaudio.ogg

    [download]
    I know it can be done with a Perl script, but a 1-liner in shell is easier.
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]
[d/l]
      For a variety of reasons, I think I'll be switching to MP3. I have already encoded the 'recent' talks in MP3, and I think I'll go back and re-encode the first months talks too.

      Now I didn't try the apps you mention. I wasn't happy with the results, when I used lower rates, using the tools I had available at the time. I will be continuing to experiment with the sizes, rates and qualities as time goes on.

      Thanks for your example. I will check it out.

[reply]
Re: Toronto Perl Mongers Audio Archives
by Jaap (Curate) on Nov 06, 2004 at 14:58 UTC
[reply]
      It looks as thought there was an ISP problem with the place where the files are stored.

      You should be able to get through now.

[reply]
Re: Toronto Perl Mongers Audio Archives
by knoebi (Friar) on Nov 07, 2004 at 17:05 UTC
    Thank you, I personally think its a great Idea. Even if I like to go to conferences, you can't go everywhere and its pretty cool to listen to some talks at home.
    I just listed to "Automated Testing - Class::DBI" and it was easy for me to follow the presentation together with the slides, but I could imagine, that it's pretty hard to follow the speech if you don't have the slides in front of you.
    Really nice would be if the slides would change like they did during the presentation. There are many ways I could imagine how you you could do that pretty easy.
    1. Using a FullScreen Capturing, which works everywhere but produces quite big files.
    2. If the Presenation is HTML based, you could use something like HTTP-Recorder which would record the session automatically. You just have to start the audio presenation at the correct time.
    Do you think this would be useful?
    ciao
    Philipp
[reply]
      Sorry for the delay in responding...

      Yes, having something automated would be nice... having a multi-media recording instead of just audio would be nice...

      But, for now I am content in providing the audio only, and links to slides as people might provide them. Everything else is (regreatably) more time than I want to spend on embelishing the process right now.

      The November meeting (available now) would really be improved if you could see what the person was doing while he was talking, and even his slides are not enough (well... only for the jokes), the rest was a live presentation. So that means full multi-media.

      So for now... the world will have to stay content with this lower-tech presentation.

[reply]

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