PyCon 2006 / Stackless Python presentation video

Back in 2006, CCP attended its first PyCon. Kristján Valur Jónsson and I were sent to attend, with Kristján Valur doing a presentation and both of us sprinting to bring Stackless Python up to date. Christian Tismer had been preoccupied with PyPy. But he kindly made himself available to hold our hands through the sprint.

On a whim I acquired CCP's video camera and recorded Kristján Valur's presentation. However, the tape was never processed and sat in and on various desks for over a year. Since I am leaving CCP, I decided to make sure this video was processed.


However this wasn't an easy matter. The video was extracted from the tape into an avi file encoded with a Sony DV codec. Nothing except for Microsoft tools seemed to want to recognise the audio. Which meant that if I wanted to encode an XviD version, I needed to reencode an existing WMV reencoding of the Sony DV avi. Unfortunately this was a dead end, no matter what I tried I was unable to get the XviD to have audio which was in sync with the video. The WMV played perfectly of course. Windows Media Encoder was a pleasure to use - it just worked. I tried using AutoGK and StaxRip for the XviD encoding and they were also a pleasure to use, but just weren't able to do the job.

If anyone can convince me that they have experience working around audio sync problems and converting Sony DV codecs, I can provide the 8 GB Sony DV avi or the 1 GB WMV for reencoding to XviD.

Anyway, here is the video on Google Video:



Originally posted 2007/30/05; Updated 2008/06/05: Reuploaded the video, which was not working. Previously, it would upload and sit in the Processing state. I gave up and left it that way for a year. Reuploading it now, Google seem to have updated their quality to blurry converter to be able to handle the WMV format better.