Bencredible

My goal is to make SpaceVidcast the best space video site on the Internet.  I believe there are five things needed to make this happen, and these five things hold true for any video related site:
1 – Get a great community of evangelists
2 – Have best of class audio and video quality
3 – Make it easy to view, share and find content
4 – Have best of class content
5 – Be timely.  Don’t hold on to media forever.  If it is older than a week stale, you’re probably too late.

Alone it’s not possible to do all five things and have a full time job, but that’s why a core group of evangelists is so important.  By having people who not only are passionate about the topic you’re interested in but who are also willing to help spend time in making the videocast better you end up with a show immensely better than what otherwise could have been done.  And to this end we have *awesome* evangelists at SpaceVidcast.com.  My point is, I can only concentrate on one or two of the five items at a time.  Lately I have been working on #4 and #2.

Lets talk about improving the video quality of SpaceVidcast for a moment, shall we?

One of the things we do is record NASA TV 24×7.  This allows us to find interesting clips from NASA, edit them up and re-post them as even more interesting clips on the SpaceVidcast.com site.  For example if we want to have an archive of all the STS-126 footage we have, we’ll just grab that from NASA TV.  The problem is that the signal we get is digital from the satellite then converted to analog in the satellite receiver then back to digital to bring it in to the computer all before we can edit it.  So we’re stepping on the video a lot.  That’s bad.

To improve the quality of our NASA TV feed I recently purchased a FireDTV S2 which is a little set top box that the satellite plugs directly in to.  Rather than converting the video stream a bunch of times, this box takes the raw MPEG 2 sent to the satellite and puts that on the computer.  This box normally doesn’t work in the US, but it just so happens that the channels I need are not encrypted so in my specific case it will work fine.

FireDTV S2

Last night my FireDTV S2 came in the mail, and I was all excited.  I pulled it out of the box and immediately I was bummed.  I had forgotten that European power bricks use a different type of outlet.  So I went online, found a 12volt 2amp power brick at Best Buy, ran over and purchased it.  Brought it home only to realize that the FireDTV S2 actually can get its power from Firewire, no power brick required.  Heh, oops.

OK, got the unit powered up, running and operating.  Time to do a test record.  Got the media, perform an export and… on noes!  It looks like poo!!!  The satellite is capturing at 544×408 resolution rather than the 640×480 resolution I used to be capturing at.  In the old scenario I had hardware decoders that would convert the video to a slightly higher resolution and in hardware remove the interlacing.  Now I have none of that, I have the raw signal from the satellite, interlacing and all.

No need to panic.  Much.  I take the file and after playing for hours and hours in Episode Pro with different variations of frame size, GOP structure, de-interlace filters and such I think we finally have a file that is a touch better than the system we had before.  Will anyone notice the quality difference?  Probably not.  So why do it?

There are several reasons that I have spent the time, money and aggravation to make this work.  First and foremost is that rather than recording a 4Mbps MPEG 2 file now I’m recording a 2Mbps MPEG 2 file right from the satellite.  Smaller files mean fewer hard drives which saves me money.  That is good since I bankroll SpaceVidcast out of my own pocket.  This also opens the door for us to do HD when we’re able to get a C-Band dish.  The second reason is that this process will allow us to get videos out the door faster.  Rather than exporting to h.264, adding a bug, re-exporting to h.264 then uploading to YouTube now all we need to do is export to YouTube and the bug, deinterlace filter and cropping options will all be set at the same time.  So it is faster, we save money, we step on the video less and we look better than before.

Will this make a difference in the end?  Dunno.  I believe that every little bit helps.  Good enough is never good enough, so just the fact that we continue to find ways to improve the video quality and speed to market should be enough proof that we’re in this because we give a damn.  I think that shows to people watching the episodes, which in turn helps them become evangelists.  Evangelists in turn help produce and promote the show which helps us get better gear which helps us get more evangelists, so forth and so on.