Talking to Alexander Limi about video and plone
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Category Archives: video
Budapest
I’m in Budapest for work, attending the Plone Conference. We’re focusing on the following:
- The Future of Plone Video – looking at using Dexterity and other bleeding edge tech to prototype plone video functionality going forward
- The development of a “Plone Video Suite” that would enable most of the “must have” functionality based on already existing small tools such as collective.flowplayer, p4avideoembed etc. The aim is to avoid building something monolithic and re-inventing the wheel and to keep the suite small with the minimum required functionality. We want to ensure we have realistic outcomes that are reachable during the sprint. A lot of the tools are already there, they just need to be tweaked to play well together.
- Enhancing and bug fixing existing video tools such as plone4artists and Plumi.
I’ve not been to Europe before – Budapest is beautiful.
Pigeons and data transfer
I’m doing a bit of policy work around the NBN at the moment, and one of the things that keeps popping up is the issue of data capacity and transfer, latency and throughput. Having worked with video for years, I’m always reminded that uncompressed video data transfer is still faster by the post or sneakernet.
Cory Doctorow has a great breakdown of the relative data issues:
over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn’t an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.
I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.