pyvideo status: August 19th, 2012

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I've been working with Carl from NextDayVideo to get the API working so that he can push straight from his system to pyvideo.org after he's done his post-processing for a conference. That'll mean that conferences his company videos will make it to pyvideo a lot faster. That's good because they video a lot of Python-related conferences.

In the process of doing that, I made a lot of headway on fixing the richard API and also steve.

Wait, what? Who are all these people?

So, richard is the video index website software that runs pyvideo.org. It has an admin that allows you to add videos one by one, but there's no way to add a collection of videos and no way to batch-process videos. Each conference is pretty different. I decided it would be far too time-consuming to write one web ui that could do everything I need if only because I don't really know what I need because each conference is different. Instead, I decided to write a command line utility and library of utility functions that make it easy to script something for a specific set of videos. That's steve.

Today I finished up enough of steve to do PyCon AU 2011. I'm also in the middle of a couple of other conferences, but since PyCon AU 2012 is happening right now, I figured I'd switch gears and finish that one first. It took about 3 hours for 30 videos. That's not bad considering I spent some of that time fixing bugs in steve.

Anyhow, this is a milestone in the whole richard/steve/pyvideo.org thing.

The future

The future is that I don't want to be doing all this work. Going forward, I want other people to use steve to build a bunch of JSON files that they send to me. Then I'll curate that and add it to the site. In this way, it spreads the work around and I don't have to do it all.

The future also allows anyone to suggest fixes to the data for videos that are already on pyvideo.org in a way that I can go through a queue of these fixes and approve/deny them quickly. In this way, we continue to have a curated index of videos, but it's easy to suggest fixes and thus more likely they'll happen.

Both of those are down the road, but definitely before the end of this year.

Both of those are really important because a single person can't run an index of videos this size.

That's where things are at! I'll be working through the conference backlog slowly over the next few months.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.