

New Emacs Org-mode talk by Carsten Dominik - zacharypinter
http://www.nf.mpg.de/orgmode/guest-talk-dominik.html

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kinetik
How can it possibly make sense to zip the video files? It ruins any chance one
has of progressively downloading as you watch, and it can't save any
bandwidth.

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svollmar
There are two reasons I decided on zipping the video files: (1) you would want
a "real" streaming server for a streaming-type of behaviour (2) I know a
number of users who would find it difficult to save a video for offline-
viewing, once they have it playing inside their browsers. Do you agree? I am
happy to learn something new here as this is, as we mention somewhere in the
text, the first time we host any video content. And by the way, my email
address is given at the bottom of the page you are referring to and I only
found your comment accidentally.

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kinetik
Progressive video download over dumb HTTP works very well, so it's unlikely
you need a special streaming server for most use cases, and particularly not
in this case. Modern browsers have native video support for Ogg Theora
(Chrome, Firefox, Opera) or some codec in a QuickTime container now (Safari),
so if the files weren't zipped there's a good chance that progressive video
download would work for most of your audience without any special effort on
your part.

Your second point is valid, I hadn't considered it as a serious problem. I
think a better solution than a zip file is to provide a "download" link
pointing to the file that serves it with the Content-Disposition HTTP header
set. This requires some control over the web server (e.g. ability to run
script, or set up an htaccess file), so it's not always an option.

Edit: sorry for complaining on HN rather than contacting you directly. I was
venting because it's frustrating that I couldn't watch the first few minutes
of the video to decide if it's worth watching/downloading the entire video.

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svollmar
Not a problem. I have actually tried the un-zipped approach: it does indeed
work with Safari and Firefox for the Quicktime flavours. One thing I tend to
do, however, is to fast-forward the movie once to decide whether I want to
view all of it - and this is definitely not possible if it is not a special
streaming protocol. But it is probably a good idea to provide more than one
link for a movie (we do not have that many different ones anyway), so users
can decide whether they want streaming or download only. Thanks!

~~~
kinetik
That sounds like it's using the QuickTime plugin in both browsers. Firefox
won't play anything in a QuickTime container natively. If you're using the
native browser video playback support (aka HTML 5 <video>), you should be able
to seek anywhere in the video without a special server as long as the web
server supports HTTP range requests, which is part of HTTP 1.1 and should work
by default with most configurations.

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corruption
Org-mode is my secret weapon. Org-mode + babel + agendas + latex = out of this
world productivity.

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ww520
org-mode is awesome. I've used Emacs for a long time but never got the chance
to use it. Then my task list was out of control. I sucked it up and spent a
day to learn about org-mode. It has been amazing.

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naner
Org-mode would be more appealing if they used markdown like everyone else.

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vsync
Markdown sucks and org-mode is my refuge from it.

