Les Instants Video
PMB Database
One of the roles of Les Instants for the OASIS project was to explore low budget technical solutions for database administration accessible to small institutions and structures. We natu-rally looked into free and open source software in priority.
The open source software movement has become very important with the develop-ment of the Internet. High quality software is developed by large communities of users and programmers. This functioning results in many advantages : most open source software are free of charge, the user communities are very active therefore bugs or other problems are identified by the users and taken into account by developers much faster than for regular commercial software.
Video Streaming
The French partner Les Instants Video has done a large number of streaming tests. One of those was a long-term test on a video documentation lasting several hours. They have ar-rived at the following result:
After researching the best compromise between image quality and file size, Quicktime video format with H264 video codec and AAC sound was chosen for the videos made available through our database.
Videos are proposed in two different picture resolutions according to their length: short vid-eos (less than 10 minutes) are encoded with a size of 640 by 480 pixels (VGA), longer vid-eos are 320 by 240 pixels (QVGA) in order to obtain a reasonable final file size. One minute of QVGA resolution video with 128Kb AAC sound results in a 3Mo file, 5Mo for one minute of VGA video. An encoding bit rate of 700Kb/s allows full screen playback with good picture quality.
We ran tests with a set of 30 different works which are currently available on our website. More videos will be available in the future.
The goal of the PMB database of Les Instants Video is not to systematically archive and stream full length video works which is impossible for a small institution for different eco-nomical reasons : the financial, technical and human means necessary to encode hundreds of hours of video, the cost of storage on web servers, the restrictions of copyright.
Therefore we have to limit the number of videos stored on our server. The role of a festival is first to promote the works that wouldn't be seen by the public otherwise through the usual circuits of distribution. Exhaustive information and documentation of the artworks is the main goal, the streaming of a given video will depend on different criteria : we will privilege works that are less distributed, young artists or rare pieces, and the artist or copyright holder should give authorization for the public and free webcasting of a video.
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