On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Brian<brian.min...@colorado.edu> wrote: > A reasonable estimate would require knowledge of how much free video can be > automatically acquired, it's metadata automatically parsed and then > automatically uploaded to commons. I am aware of some massive archives of > free content video. Current estimates based on images do not necessarily > apply to video, especially as we are just entering a video-aware era of the > internet. At any rate, while Gerard's estimate is a bit optimistic in my > view, it seems realistic for the near term.
So— The plan is that we'll lose money on every transaction but we'll make it up in volume? (Again, this time without math: The rate of increase as a function of video-minutes of the amortized hardware costs costs for local transcoding is lower than the rate of increase in bandwidth costs needed to send off the source material to users to transcode in a distributed manner. This holds for pretty much any reasonable source bitrate, though I used 4mbit/sec in my calculaton. So regardless of the amount of video being uploaded using users is simply more expensive than doing it locally) Existing distributed computing projects work because the ratio of CPU-crunching to communicating is enormously high. This isn't (and shouldn't be) true for video transcoding. They also work because there is little reward for tampering with the system. I don't think this is true for our transcoding. There are many who would be greatly gratified by splicing penises into streams far more so than anonymously and undetectably making a protein fold wrong. ... and it's only reasonable to expect the cost gap to widen. On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 9:57 AM, David Gerard<dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > Oh hell yes. If I could just upload any AVI or MPEG4 straight off a > camera, you bet I would. Just imagine what people who've never heard > the word "Theora" will do. Sweet! Except, *instead* of developing the ability to upload straight off a camera what is being developed is user-distributed video transcoding— which won't do anything itself to make it easier to upload. What it will do is waste precious development cycles maintaining an overly complicated software infrastructure, waste precious commons administration cycles hunting subtle and confusing sources of vandalism, and waste income from donors by spending more on additional outbound bandwidth than would be spent on computing resources to transcode locally. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
