another reason to wish I was in Melbourne [sigh]

[miriam_e]

The Science Issues Cafe is meeting this week (Friday 16th June) at 7.30 pm. The topic is Climate Change, and the speaker is Dr Paul Holper from CSIRO Climate.

Venue: Princes Hill Community Centre, rear 270 Macpherson St North Carlton. Donation $5.

RSVP would be appreciated, 9489 5095 or email kh@netspace,net.au

Comments

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation i can't make it either, and I do live here. I'm picking tooticky up at the airport instead. :(

One day....

[(Anonymous)]

One day podcasting will be as easy as switching on a portable device.

Clubs and societies will record their meetings and presentations and make them downloadable from their websites.

(Maybe video as well - if bandwidth grows.)

If the ABC and BBC can do it, we'll all be able to do it in a few years.

MFG

Re: One day....

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

An excellent idea Michael!

It's already absurdly easy already to do.

Most radio shows that I listen to I also record to my machine as mp3 files. I only download from the ABC when I miss one. My files are much more efficient than the ABC ones because with speech you don't need as much fidelity, so a 50 minute Science Show that is 22MB downloaded from the ABC is just 11MB when I digitise it. If I used ogg format (I really should) I might be able to do even better. On occasion I've uploaded programs for friends and family when they have missed particularly interesting ones and I regularly take shows up to my family on CD. A whole year of Science Show (low fidelity) fits on a single CD and still has room left over. Now that DVD players (thanks to China) can play mp3 CDs I have sent a number of my low-tech friends mp3 CDs of radio shows to pop into the DVD player.

XviD makes it possible to record long videos of meetings or conversations as incredibly small files. This is why the whole Hollywood push for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs is such a con. High definition programs already easily fit on ordinary CDs and many will fit on an ordinary DVD if compressed with XviD. (XviD is free.)

Use the free Audacity to record and edit sound and to encode to ogg format, or download the free Lame mp3 encoder library so Audacity can use it.

Capture video and audio with a digital camera or webcam. Compress it to XviD using VirtualDub.

We don't have to wait. We can do it now... in fact a lot of us already are. But meetings? I haven't heard of anybody doing that. What a wonderful idea.