[IMC-Satellite] roll call please? and online video stuff

[blank at riseup.net]

Hello everyone,

Some of you already know me, but for those of you who don't my name is
blank and I volunteer with the Portland Indymedia Video Collective here in
Portland Oregon.

As far as my skills I mostly go out and film events and actions that
happen arond here in Portland and help to put them together into shorts
(ranging from 20 seconds to 30 minutes) to show at screenings here around
the city called Videos From The Resistance (also known as VFTR).

I'm one of two people here in Portland that have been helping to get
videos online and have some skills in that area, although I'm still
improving. Currently myself and the other person working to get videos
online have been experimenting with different codecs and media players on
all platforms in open and closed source. The both of us are about to move
forward with our next chapter of videos online and are already posting
video from different imc projects to our bit torrent tracker (
http://indytorrents.org ), so there is a lot of experience here with
getting video online and out there as much as possible.

Speaking of bit torrent, I'll give you a general rundown of what you need
to do if anyone was wondering how to get torrent files onto the web so
people can download video.

First off, you'll need your video. It will need to be on a computer, and
the faster the internet connection the better. You'll want that connection
to be open all the time, but I'll get to that later.

Next you'll want to download a program that will enable you to make
torrent files on your computer. Azureus is the first program that comes to
mind. You can pretty do everything you'll need with that program (but it's
on mac and I'm not sure if there is a version for pc or linux). After you
have download a program that can make torrent files, make a torrent file
from the video you have on your hard drive. A torrent file is a link that
points to your computers hard drive for only the file(s) you want to
share. You can link to as many files as you want in one torrent link, it
doesn't matter.

Once you've made torrent files of your video you'll want to either post
them to a torrent tracker. A torrent tracker is where all your torrent
files are kept. You can make one, or use one that is online such as
http://www.torrentspy.com to post your torrent file(s) to. For a project
such as the NewsReel I would make your own tracker.

A tracker not only keeps track of all the video's you've posted, but it
enables the torrent file to point to the data (megs or gigs of video) from
someones or somethings hard drive. This is why it is best to have a
connection that is always online so anyone can download at any time.

You will need to "seed' the video to make it so others can download the
video. The more seeds you have the faster your connection will be. A seed
is a point of origin. You have to start off from at least one place. As
people download, they can choose to seed the video or not. This is good
because the people downloading the video decided to share the connection
will be even faster, Sort of like Kazaa.

Once our video has had a torrent link made, had that link posted to a
tracker, and is ready to download you'll want to download a peer-2-peer
sharing program like bit torrent. This will enable you to download the
video from the torrent link, which connects to the video tracker, which
points to the computer that has the video(s) on it's hard drive.

Unlike normal video downloads were there is just one source of
information, and depending on how many people there are downloading, and
how much bandwidth that connection has... one of the advantages to
peer-2-peer networks is you can have a million people downloading one file
all at once and wont have to worry about your connection crashing or being
knocked down in bandwidth by your ISP (because your only sharing
1/1,000,000th of that file since there are 999,999 others). File sharing
is a great thing with bit torrent and it shows while your downloading,
your also uploading to other people on the network. Once again, the more
people downloading the faster the connection and the more seeds you will
most likely have. That means you'll have a better connection longer for
other people to download whatever video that person wants to see. Presto!
your video is out there and reaching people all over the world!

So yeah, that's just a start. If anyone has any questions let me know or
go to the #portland irc room at http://irc.indymedia.org and either talk
to juggo or blank in that room. do some google search's too and learn what
you can from their. That's how the Portland video's that are online came
to be. You can check out those videos by going to
http://portland.indymedia.org and either clicking on the video page and
going to the given links or click near the very top of the front page for
a list of videos online. keep in mind to follow the instructions, and if
any links are broken just google it. Glad to see new energy in the
NewsReel.


Never relent!

blank