Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to SlashdotTV! (Video)

You may have noticed that we've posted quite a few original videos on Slashdot in the past few months. Rather than being the work of a few rogue editors with newly-acquired Christmas cameras, this was part of the groundwork for a new site we're launching today. SlashdotTV, found at http://tv.slashdot.org, will let you easily find and watch all of our videos in one convenient location. In addition to Slashdot content, you also can watch videos from our sister sites, SourceForge and ThinkGeek. The site is brand new, and we're interested in hearing your feedback -- what you think about it, and what kind of videos you'd like to see. Currently, you can embed our videos on your own site or show them to your friends with our share feature. Commenting is coming soon. Check back often for new videos, and keep watching!

Comments

Timmeey!

[MasterMan]

Timothy looks at Pixel Qi
Timothy checks out Ubuntu TV
Timothy Gets a MakerBot Replicator Demo at CES
Timothy Lord Checks Out Keyboards & Tech At CES
Timothy Lord @ Metrix Create:Space in Seattle
Timothy Lord Checks Out Steve Jackson Games' Latest

what you think about it, and what kind of videos you'd like to see

We want more videos were timothy checks out and looks at things!

Re:Timmeey!

[TheRaven64]

How about a video of Timothy Lord actually checking a submitted story before he posts it? Maybe also a video of Timothy Lord attending a remedial English class?

It's Not April Yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure this isn't intended as an April Fools article?

Re:It's Not April Yet

[truthsearch]

On Sunday I'm expecting lots of videos with ponies.

Stop doing it in Flash

[SgtChaireBourne]

Stop doing the videos in Flash. It's a proprietary wrapper usable on a decreasing number of platforms. Better formats for video already exist. If you want old, then go with MPEG. If you want new, go with WebM. Either way, you'll both reach a larger audience and future-proof your work.

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[truthsearch]

Of all the sites that could go HTML5 video only, this should be the first.

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[vlm]

Just like "we" were the first with UTF-8

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[L4t3r4lu5]

Just like "we" were the first with UTF-8

Never had it working fully.

I'll bet you £1000 that the Pound Sterling sign prior to the integer in this sentence is preceeded by the letter A with a circumflex above it. This has been broken since the change to Unicode was made, and never fixed.

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[TheRaven64]

I disagree. Currently, flash blocking plugins are much more mature than ones to block HTML5 videos. I encourage Slashdot to keep using Flash for this kind of inanity. It makes it much easier to skip over the video, because it just renders as a grey box, which doesn't take a noticeable amount of CPU power.

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop doing the videos in Flash. It's a proprietary wrapper usable on a decreasing number of platforms. Better formats for video already exist. If you want old, then go with MPEG. If you want new, go with WebM. Either way, you'll both reach a larger audience and future-proof your work.

No mobile access. Less resolution than a Youtube video. Lame.

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Hmm... Let me check the password protection...

***************

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[TheRaven64]

That's not all that they're for. They also stop us having to see videos - or even still images - of Timothy Lord...

Re:Stop doing it in Flash

[Kvorg]

I was honestly suprized at the lack of HTML 5 support. I not only expected it to be there, this being a Slashdot subsite, but I expected it to be the default or at least to autodetect my browser support and start working from there. Well, let's say it's early days.

Just make a YouTube page

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about 12 years too late.

Re:Just make a YouTube page

[vlm]

They Could follow the advice of the comments and use modern container files, modern html to display it, high res (like HD res, not 360 px instead of 240 px like youtube), make torrent available, working RSS feeds of the video files ready to feed into mythnettv and the other TV appliances...

Re:Just make a YouTube page

[stoolpigeon]

Slashdot has been my point of primary internet interaction for a while now. My first comment was posted almost 11 years ago - so I figure I've been here regularly for at least that long. I've done meet ups with slashdot friends 4 times over the years, the most recent was just a couple weeks ago. I'm not a neutral party - I have a bias towards the site. If I didn't like it I wouldn't have stayed this long.

There are problems to be sure - but I do believe the site still has value. There are still a significant number of knowledgable people that are engaged with the site. There are of course, and always have been people who troll and (even more caustic in my opinion) people who gripe incessentaly about everything. But even with them, people keep coming.

I'm not sure what you are looking for in regards to a "notable thing" coming out of slashdot. I view it as a place that provides a service - interaction with tech news in a primarily FOSS oriented community. A lot of the limits on community building come out of a desire to keep the signal to noise ratio good. I was very active on reddit for a while but a few months ago I deleted my account and visit rarely now. Too much crap to filter to get to the good stuff. It obviously works for a lot of people but I'm willing to bet that I'm not alone in preferring a place like this. I'm not as up on my advice animal memes as I was before - but I don't feel too bad about that. It's a cool community, but not really for me.

HN is pretty awesome though the volume of posting and interaction there is a lot lower. Quality over quantity - but you can't site that as a good site compared to slashdot and blame slashdots woes on a rigid commenting system. I do like it though for the same reason I like it here - I've got a good idea of what I'll get and a good percentage of the commentors will be knowledgable.

My Opinion

[eternaldoctorwho]

I think that having a new tv.slashdot.org is completely fine and even a little cool. However, my preference is that these videos should only be posted to that site, and not to "regular" Slashdot. Or at least provide a standard tag or category which we can filter out if we choose. We know where to go if we want to watch videos - the TV icon at the top (nice job on that btw, it was immediately obvious to me what that new icon signified even before reading this article). Otherwise, I'm just looking for text blurbs and snarky/humorous user comments, sometimes with optional videos behind the summary's links. Maybe we can just get the story summary text, with a link below the summary that says "Check out the video over on Slashdot TV!"?

Oh, transcripts for all videos on the TV site would be helpful for many as well.

Re:My Opinion

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Of all the things that users have been asking for, this was not on the list. Do you even listen?

What next - powerpoint slide decks?

I want to be able to exclude it from the list of stories - life is too short to look at a video that takes 5 to 10 minutes to say what I can glom from reading a story in 30 seconds.

April 1st

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Does this bring back the chat roulette feature?

Is it just me...or?

[grasshoppa]

I actually don't like video content on the web; for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is that the audio from the video would give me away at work.

I mean, I hope this works out and is the revenue generator you hope it is, but as I think many of us are viewing the site from work, I don't know how popular a destination it's going to be.

Re:Is it just me...or?

[SJHillman]

My video usage:

At work: Videos without audio (double points if it has closed captioning)
At home: Videos in the background so I only hear the audio... usually pulling up a song I haven't heard in a while on YouTube.

The only time I pay attention to both the audio and video is when watching Netflix... and even then I usually have Netflix on my right monitor, Minecraft on my center monitor and Opera on my left monitor so it doesn't get my undivided attention. Videos lack the interactivity to keep me fully entertained on their own.

Does not work in Safari

[objekt]

Does not work in Safari, unlike youtube and 99% of all other online video sites which work fine in Safari (Mac OS X)

Re:Does not work in Safari

[TheRaven64]

Works fine for me in Safari 5.1.4 on OS X and ClickToPlugin installed. I see a grey box, just as I'd expect.

Re:Sharing?

[vlm]

and I'll have to check it out when I'm not at work.

The specs on this are going to be interesting. Not at work, not on a phone with poor data coverage, not in a meeting, not in a teleconference, not while "watching" tv... this is what, like 1% of my /. time?

Re:Ads...lots of ads.

[truthsearch]

If it was ad-free, and therefore a paid service, few would buy it. As long as they clearly mark the sponsored content I'm fine with it.

Well, good luck with it, but text rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I find text to be 10x faster to process than watching a video. Text is easier to skim, it's easier to search, a page of text can explain something in more detail and more precisely than 10 minutes of video, and it probably takes up 1000x less space/bandwidth, etc. When I watch video documentation it feels like everything is in slow motion compared to reading. As a bonus, text is also usable by people with visual and/or sound impairments, when using the right equipment.

Resorting to video is like the equivalent of GUI operating systems versus command-line: it's easier to do in some ways (just sit in front of a camera), and sometimes it's the better way to go (so feel free to experiment with new ways of doing things), but often you can be vastly more efficient with the old way of doing things. Personally, I've skipped every video that has been posted on slashdot in the last few months. I'd rather read the comments. Considering the extra time and effort it takes to set up a video shoot and process it afterwards, and the extra bandwidth to deliver it, I'll be surprised if it pays off. But keep experimenting. It's healthy.

Re:Well, good luck with it, but text rules

[tlhIngan]

I find text to be 10x faster to process than watching a video. Text is easier to skim, it's easier to search, a page of text can explain something in more detail and more precisely than 10 minutes of video, and it probably takes up 1000x less space/bandwidth, etc. When I watch video documentation it feels like everything is in slow motion compared to reading. As a bonus, text is also usable by people with visual and/or sound impairments, when using the right equipment.

Resorting to video is like the equivalent of GUI operating systems versus command-line: it's easier to do in some ways (just sit in front of a camera), and sometimes it's the better way to go (so feel free to experiment with new ways of doing things), but often you can be vastly more efficient with the old way of doing things. Personally, I've skipped every video that has been posted on slashdot in the last few months. I'd rather read the comments. Considering the extra time and effort it takes to set up a video shoot and process it afterwards, and the extra bandwidth to deliver it, I'll be surprised if it pays off. But keep experimenting. It's healthy.

I've never had the slashdot videos work for me at all. So I've never seen one, just generally skipped it. At least, the ones that weren't YouTube based. (FYI Slashdot: YouTube is supposed by a LOT of devices - you might want to use them).

And no, video is not easier to produce than text. Amateurs may think i tis, but it isn't if you want an enjoyable experience. Case in point - a website started doing video reviews - they took 20 minutes to do what text would've done in 5, had to spend extra effort putting up charts and such in the article, and the video was still unwatchable because it was obviously a first pass, full of "ums" "ahs" and "errs", and barely edited.

A proper video with proper sound (you better get and use a microphone at a minimum, directional ones if it's going to be stuck to a camera), as well as a definite plan of action and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Some people are gifted enough to be able to do it in a single pass, but most aren't, so a script is handy (you want to know why the teleprompter was invented and why most speakers use one?).

And editing, lots of editing. Don't just hold a sheet of paper with a chart or other graphic, you should cut to the graphic in the video.

If you don't have a cameraperson to operate the camera, you better prepare to do a lot of editing, or have everything close at hand to reach and show.

Doing a good video can take far longer and requires far more preparation than doing it in text - which may explain why sites stopped doing everything in video and started doing selections to augment the text, proper use of multimedia capabilities.

I can't watch...

[Mr. Droopy Drawers]

If I watch, I think it will count against my Bandwidth Cap

I Want My /.TV

[theodp]

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it
You play the keyboards on the /.TV

Provide a transcript

[b0bby]

I find that unless there's actually something cool which you really need to see in action to understand, I'm much happier reading than watching something. So if you're doing an interview, provide a transcript.

bug or feature?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash 11.1.102.63 here on Fedora and none of the slashdot videos have played on this machine.
Good luck with the "linux" category :)

Will never visit.

[ledow]

Will never visit.

Just like idle.slashdot.org (whose sarcastic "Waste of your time. Don't ever go there" I feel is the best advice I've heard).

Whenever there's been a video post, I've been quite quick to complain about it (and I'm not the only one), so yeah, shove them off into tv.slashdot.org so I can ignore it totally.

Sorry, but I (used to) come on here for information and news. It takes HUNDREDS of times longer to convey that information in a video than it does on a text page, which is why I don't watch TV News, and why I came to Slashdot for some techy/geeky news that other online outfits were lacking in.

Separate it off, but don't be shocked that nobody goes on there. And I'd have preferred your developer time and bandwidth to have been put to some better use all along, if I'm honest.

Partner with YouTube or Vimeo, or do HTML5 please.

[DdJ]

I hate watching videos on a conventional computer. I prefer to watch them on a tablet or real TV.

If you were to partner with either YouTube or Vimeo, I could use existing integrations for set-top boxes or the app on my iPad to view the stuff.

If you were to just to HTML5 video, I could at least bring the video up on my iPhone and "AirPlay" it to my TV.

As it is, I can't even watch it in Google Chrome. I've removed the generic Flash player from my computer, but I do allow Chrome to maintain and use its own internal copy. But even that copy can't play your videos. I am guessing that this is because I've got paranoid security settings, forbidding Flash from ever using any local storage at all (because I don't trust advertisers).

So, in short, I certainly can't see the videos in my preferred way, and when I try to view them the way I'm "supposed to", I get a blank screen with no warnings or errors or anything.

Do Not Want.

You're not alone. I prefer text.

[concealment]

The contents of a three-minute video can generally be typed up into a half-page of text and read in thirty seconds.

The exceptions are walk-throughs that are difficult to describe in writing, or content that requires visual or audio.

For me, it's not a matter of being seen goofing off. I have headphones. But it's more a use of my time. If I'm going to goof off, I want to goof off *efficiently*.

Transcripts, Transcript

[QuasiSteve]

Oh, transcripts for all videos on the TV site would be helpful for many as well.

I think that may just be in the pipeline ;)

For now, here's the Transcript for this video.
-----
Title: Welcome to SlashdotTV
Description: Welcoe to SlashdotTV, the / dedicated channel for all video on / Slashdot. This new site lets you / easily browse and watch videos / based on a number of criteria, / including title, subject keywords, / popularity, and those handpicked / by the site's dedicated editors.

[00:00] <TITLE>
The SlashdotTV logo bar slides down from the top of the screen over a background that shows the SlashdotTV page, and "Welcome to TV.Slashdot.org" fades into the bar.

[00:01] Timothy>
Introducing SlashdotTV, where we get up-close and personal [...]

[00:03] <TITLE>
Various shots from interviews quickly pass by at this time.

[00:03] Timothy>
[...] or drop in via video chat with interesting people from all parts of the tech spectrum;

[00:09] Timothy>
From hobbyists [...]

[00:10] <TITLE>
A shot from the Qu8ke interview video is shown in which a 'hobby' rocket is launched.

[00:14] <TITLE>
Various shots from interviews quickly pass by again.

[00:14] Timothy>
[...] to entrepreneurs to project leaders - and sometimes, all three at once.

[00:18] <TITLE>
The shot at this time is of Chris Qiu with the his name and title "Senior Architect/Lead Developer for the Trove Insight Solution" displayed in the bottom.

[00:18] Timothy>
There's also a corner for sponsored videos, which means supported by advertisers.

[00:22] <TITLE>
Shots of the SlashdotTV webpage pass by, relating to the spoken words.

[00:22] Timothy>
You can explore our current categories or search for videos by keyword.

[00:26] Timothy>
You can comment on videos right from the Slashdot page, or watch or re-watch them at any time from this page.

[00:32] Timothy>
We're looking for good ideas of what should make the cut.
So please help us shape Slashdot's future with your suggestions, [...]

[00:37] <TITLE>
The shot changes to that of several pinball machines.

[00:37] Timothy>
[...] and keep watching for more.

There are more important things for Slashdot to do

[MobyDisk]

At this risk of sounding like a troll, or maybe just a fuddy-duddy: I think there are more important things for Slashdot to work on than adding new features.

There are a lot of bugs and limitations on the site. The last time Slashdot posted one of their "Hey, look what we did!" stories there were a lot of good positive often-repeated suggestions - many of which were ignored. Unicode support was moderated to 5 many times in that story. Instead we get achievements, idle, and Slashdot TV. Unicode support, working & faster preview, better comments section, etc. were top suggestions that have been ignored for years. Maybe I'm biased: I use Slashdot because it is entirely text based so this feature doesn't excite me terribly. Nonetheless, I think priorities need to be straightened here.

No.

[vikingpower]

In and by itself, video: why not. But the "essence" of Slashdot, if I may use so vague a term, seems to reside in two strongly defined and profiled points: tech news in text format, and user-user-moderation. Video does not enhance either of these. Nor is it "stuff that matters".Therefore: irrelevant. Does not add any value to the core business. It MAY increase the site's worth in the eyes of a potential buyer. To me as a loooooooooooooong-time slashdotter, however, video on /. is... well... howshalliputit.... of no use.

Re:I encourage U to "face the music" here

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to seek psychiatric help.

This is not a joke. I am not aiming to get a +2 Funny, nor am I insulting or trolling you. You seriously need to get some professional medical attention.

Re:U're modded funny: This = funnier... apk

[Ginger Unicorn]

If the slashdot admins wanted to keep APK out they could compile a kind of blocklist of IP addresses that he posts from. But what to keep it in...? Some kind FILE full of HOSTS maybe? I'm sure APK could weigh in with some suggestions...