For personal reasons, I didn't make it to DebConf18 in Taiwan this year; but that didn't mean I wasn't interested in what was happening. Additionally, I remotely configured SReview, the video review and transcoding system which I originally wrote for FOSDEM.

I received a present for that today:

And yes, of course I'm happy about that

On a side note, the videos for DebConf18 have all been transcoded now. There are actually three files per event:

• The .webm file contains the high quality transcode of the video. It uses VP9 for video, and Opus for audio, and uses the Google-recommended settings for VP9 bitrate configuration. On modern hardware with decent bandwidth, you'll want to use this file.
• The .lq.webm file contains the low-quality transcode of the video. It uses VP8 for video, and Vorbis for audio, and uses the builtin default settings of ffmpeg for VP8 bitrate configuration, as well as a scale-down to half the resolution; those usually end up being somewhere between a third and half of the size of the high quality transcodes.
• The .ogg file contains the extracted vorbis audio from the .lq.webm file, and is useful only if you want to listen to the talk and not watch it. It's also the smallest download, for obvious reasons.

If you have comments, feel free to let us know on the mailinglist