Pyvideo (old posts, page 1)

pyvideo status: September 6th, 2012

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What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I posted the videos for EuroPython 2012 last night. Many thanks to Omar who pulled together metadata for the conference.

If you look at the videos on the site, the data is kind of a mess. I spent a bunch of time reconciling issues with the data from the YouTube feed with data from the EuroPython 2012 site and fixed a lot of issues, but there's still a lot left to do.

I spent about 10 hours working on the data for EuroPython 2012.

My current plan is to leave it like this for now and forge ahead to catch up with other conferences from 2012. Then I'll go back and continue working on a system for crowd-sourcing metadata fixes. That will make it easier for anyone to fix data they see is wrong and also remove me as a bottleneck to a better index of Python video.

I'm working on SciPy 2012, PyCon AU 2012, and PyCon DE 2011. You can see the queue of conferences here.

pyvideo status: August 31st, 2012

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What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I posted the videos for EuroPython 2011 last night. Many thanks to N who pulled together metadata for the conference. That saved me gobs of time.

I want to work on EuroPython 2012 next. I've pulled all the data in the YouTube channel, however, the description and speaker data isn't easily available. Best I can find is https://ep2012.europython.eu/p3/schedule/ep2012/ which isn't in a form I can do much with.

I could really use some help! I need someone to either find a conference organizer and ask them for the data in some easy-to-parse format or scrape it. If possible, a JSON format would be great, but I can do any format that has a parser in the Python stdlib, database dumps, and probably other formats as well.

The key pieces of information I need are these:

  • title (this lets me match it up to the YouTube data I already have)
  • list of speakers
  • summary (short summary about the talk---sometimes called abstract)
  • description (longer-form description of the talk)
  • language the talk is in (English? Italian? ...)

Bonus points:

  • everything is in utf-8
  • summary and description are marked up in HTML

If you can help, please email me at willkg at bluesock dot org.

Thank you!

Update: Omar sent me an XML file with all the EuroPython 2012 metadata. I'm pretty sure I'm all set now. Thank you Omar!

pyvideo status: August 19th, 2012

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What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I've been working with Carl from NextDayVideo to get the API working so that he can push straight from his system to pyvideo.org after he's done his post-processing for a conference. That'll mean that conferences his company videos will make it to pyvideo a lot faster. That's good because they video a lot of Python-related conferences.

In the process of doing that, I made a lot of headway on fixing the richard API and also steve.

Wait, what? Who are all these people?

So, richard is the video index website software that runs pyvideo.org. It has an admin that allows you to add videos one by one, but there's no way to add a collection of videos and no way to batch-process videos. Each conference is pretty different. I decided it would be far too time-consuming to write one web ui that could do everything I need if only because I don't really know what I need because each conference is different. Instead, I decided to write a command line utility and library of utility functions that make it easy to script something for a specific set of videos. That's steve.

Today I finished up enough of steve to do PyCon AU 2011. I'm also in the middle of a couple of other conferences, but since PyCon AU 2012 is happening right now, I figured I'd switch gears and finish that one first. It took about 3 hours for 30 videos. That's not bad considering I spent some of that time fixing bugs in steve.

Anyhow, this is a milestone in the whole richard/steve/pyvideo.org thing.

The future

The future is that I don't want to be doing all this work. Going forward, I want other people to use steve to build a bunch of JSON files that they send to me. Then I'll curate that and add it to the site. In this way, it spreads the work around and I don't have to do it all.

The future also allows anyone to suggest fixes to the data for videos that are already on pyvideo.org in a way that I can go through a queue of these fixes and approve/deny them quickly. In this way, we continue to have a curated index of videos, but it's easy to suggest fixes and thus more likely they'll happen.

Both of those are down the road, but definitely before the end of this year.

Both of those are really important because a single person can't run an index of videos this size.

That's where things are at! I'll be working through the conference backlog slowly over the next few months.

pyvideo status: June 21st, 2012

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What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

It's been a few months since my last status report. Two things have happened and one thing hasn't.

  1. richard development progresses and it's coming along nicely. There are a few more things I really want before I think it's got a critical mass. Then I think we should start doing releases.

  2. steve development started and I'm adding functionality as I need it for adding conferences in the queue.

    Yes! We have a conferences-to-add queue in pyvideo now. And yes, the queue is long. steve makes it possible to add a conference of videos without doing them one-by-one.

    Also, if you have a conference you don't see on the site, please submit a suggestion to add it. There's a "Suggestion" link in the navbar.

So now for the thing that hasn't happened.

  1. Universal Subtitles (now renamed Amara) stopped working with blip.tv videos a couple of months ago. I had hardcoded the embed code for all the blip.tv videos on pyvideo.org. Because of this, I have to go un-hardcode the embed code in order to get the videos to work on the site at all, and it's possible we'll lose all the work we did subtitling these videos.

This really bums me out, but I'm not really sure what to do about it.

That's where things are at. I essentially took a hiatus from curating pyvideo.org while we implemented and fixed a bunch of stuff in richard and while I set up the groundwork for steve. Those two are in a better position now, so I'll be able to more easily go back to curating pyvideo.org and fixing the various issues.

pyvideo status: April 15th, 2012

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What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I started richard in order to build pyvideo.org. I threw it together in like 3 weeks and it had a lot of issues. Since then, I've had a lot of help from Reiner Gerecke and the project is moving along. There are a few more things I want before I consider richard to have a critical mass sufficient to do a version release, but we're pretty close. I'm pretty excited about that.

I updated pyvideo.org with the latest richard code today. I also spent some time fixing the speaker data---it's still kind of screwy. Amongst other things we had 3 Wesley Chuns! Now there is only one.

M.-A. Lemburg submitted two more conferences to get added for a grand total of three in my queue now. I upstreamed some fixes to vidscraper a couple of weeks ago. Once we land the API changes in richard, I'll be able to add new conferences much more easily. Right now I have to do each video by hand... it's kind of a drag.

Anyhow, things are going well, though the site looks the same and many of the issues are still there. You'll just have to take my word for it for now.

If you're interested in helping out, I sure could use you! Testing, documenting, fixing the layout of some of the pages, implementing new features, fixing project infrastructure---there are a lot of different kinds of things you could help out with. Even looking through the code and pointing out egregious issues---that's also very helpful and very welcome.

Issue trackers are here:

Code is here:

pyvideo status: March 20th, 2012

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What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I launched pyvideo.org on March 10th. That was 10 days ago. In those 10 days, I fixed a bunch of issues, screwed up the site a couple of times, got dozens of emails many with encouragement and feature requests, talked to Craig with Universal Subtitles, and watched Google Analytics with some amazement. It's been a really wild 10 days.

I think overall the experience was a successful one, but there were a series of failures most of which were because I wasn't ready to go live when I went live, but I had really run out of time. Lack of feeds, media urls, easy ways to fix data, crummy experience on iPads and Android tablets, ... The list is longish. So it goes.

Of all the successes, I'm the happiest for the following:

  • The site had 100,000 or so visitors. That roughly means that PyCon 2012 reached 98,000 more people than it otherwise would have. That means that 98,000 more people heard about programming practices, robots, outreach, libraries, applications, case studies and all the other things we learned at PyCon. That's a big win.

    Thank you to the PyCon conference crew! You run a damn good conference.

  • I got dozens of emails. Many with encouragement, some with feature requests, some with data fixing requests, and some pointing out issues with the site. I think it's awesome that so many people took the time to email me feedback to make this resource better.

  • There are 8 forks on Github of richard. Further, I've had the pleasure to add two new people to the AUTHORS file and look forward to adding a third very soon. Thank you to Reiner, David and Alejandro!

    I work on richard and pyvideo in my spare time. I think this software is useful for other conferences and other groups which is why I made it Free Software and kept it separate from pyvideo. I can't possibly do everything I want to do with it, so I spent time writing documentation to ease the barriers to entry for new contributors. I feel really good about the work I did.

I've spent the last few days writing bug reports for things that need to be fixed, fixing some, fixing some data, and working on feeds. I haven't spent a ton of time on feeds, yet. I really hope to finish it soon, though.

If you're interested in helping out, I sure could use you! Testing, documenting, fixing the layout of some of the pages, implementing new features, fixing project infrastructure---there are a lot of different kinds of things you could help out with.

Issue trackers are here:

pyvideo is live!

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What is Python Miro Community

Python Miro Community is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it and share it with Python Miro Community.

pyvideo.org is live!

About three weeks ago, I decided I really needed a bunch of things that Miro Community didn't have and it was really hampering my ability to do what I wanted to do with the site and also interoperate with Carl and Ryan's system. It was time to write my own software and host my own site.

The software is called richard. It's released under the AGPLv3, is currently hosted on Github, and it's in a ridiculously alpha state. richard is at its heart a video indexing site. I'm working on it in my "copious spare time" and hit a critial mass last night---enough to launch pyvideo.org.

I'm pulling in PyCon US 2012 videos as they're coming in right now.

Oh, wait... that means I should have started this blog post differently....

What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

More soon!