On June 6th, I was lucky to listen ‘live’ to Jimmy Wales — the guy who invented Wikipedia. Jimmy (or ‘Jimbo’, as he prefers to be called himself) has a personal blog and… (of course!) a page in Wikipedia;-)

I was able to record almost everything on video, and now, finally, I’ve succeeded in encoding & uploading the files…

Here they are!

Part 1 (~35 minutes):

[Flash player with embedded video of Jimmy Wales, Sofia, June 6th 2009 (#01)]

Part 2 (~45 minutes):

[Flash player with embedded video of Jimmy Wales, Sofia, June 6th 2009 (#02)]

Part 3 (~20 minutes):

[Flash player with embedded video of Jimmy Wales, Sofia, June 6th 2009 (#03)]

* * *

Now, if you’re curious, here are some notes:

1) The total length of the videos is around 100 minutes. They’re split in three parts: Part #1 (~35 minutes), Part #2 (~45 minutes), Part #3 (~20 minutes).

2) These 100 minutes of video are un-edited and show the presentation of Jimmy Wales almost in full — actually, maybe only half a minute of video is missing…

3) I have started the recoding a couple of seconds after Jimmy came to the stage of the theater and started speaking. I’ve ended it right after he left. During the recoding, I had to change the batteries (and the 8 GB SDHC card) once, just in case, which is exactly where the pause between videos #1 and #2 is. This pause was not longer than 15-20 seconds. Then, there was another pause (between videos #2 and #3), but it was less than 2 seconds. Also, during recording, I made maybe 2-3 photos, which are the cause for a couple of less-than-a-second interruptions, and that’s all. Apart from that, the video is completely un-cut.

4) The presentation of Jimmy was 40 minutes long + there were 60 additional minutes, filled with questions & answers. So, what you’re about to see is:

#1 (35 minutes): the presentation of Jimmy Wales (it continues on video #2);
#2 (45 minutes): the first 4 minutes are the end of his presentation — after that, the questions’ part begins;
#3 (20 minutes): the questions’ part continues, and then the evening is over and Jimmy is leaving.

(I am not that good with editing video, so I was unable to merge all there videos into one, but this is not that important, I hope:)

5) Original videos were in very good quality — .AVI format, 640 x 480 px, approx. 16 Mbps (video+audio streams), with stereo sound. I re-encoded them to .f4v format and brought them down to less than 2 Mbps, while the quality of the video/audio remained almost unchanged.

6) Encoding was made using Adobe Flash Media Encoder CS4: approx. 1.3-1.8 Mbps H.264 video and 128 kbps AAC2 audio. The player I am using here to embed them is JW FLV Player, which does a great work.

6) You’ll need a relatively new computer (Pentium 4 or better will do well) + high speed Internet connection, to be able to watch them normally (over 1 Mbps speed is recommended). If your Internet connection is slow (and there are interruptions), start the first video, and put in on ‘pause’ for a few minutes. This will allow the player to cache some part of the video stream and then you’ll be able to watch it normally. Then proceed the same with the other two videos.

7) The videos are not perfect — sometimes the camera may lose focus for a second or two, for example, or measure the light incorrectly. Also, note that most of the time I have focused the camera on Jimmy (and not on his slides) — in my defense I can only say that usually, if I did not shift focus to the presentation screen, then the things on the screen were simply the same things that Jimmy said, so I preferred to focus on the lecturer instead;-)

8) The License:

I am releasing these videos under CC-BY-SA license, which is one of the most liberal Creative Commons licenses. It allows you even the commercial use of the videos, as long as you mention me as their author + put link to www.optimiced.com (plus, optionally, to this particular page).

It’s also a good idea to link to the CC license I have used, and/or clearly specify that you are re-distributing them under the same conditions.

9) If you want to re-distribute the videos online:

Here are direct links to the files, which you may download and then upload to your own web server:

mvi_4143_jimmy_wales_part1.f4v (~ 362 MB)
mvi_4148_jimmy_wales_part2.f4v (~ 456 MB)
mvi_4149_jimmy_wales_part3.f4v (~ 210 MB)

After that, you’ll need some kind of FLV/F4V Flash player, to embed them in your own website.

For watching the videos offline, the excellent FLV Player will do a great job (works on Windows XP/Vista; if you are a Mac/Linux user, you’ll have to search for yourself, but I am sure you have a solution handy).

10) There is no 10! :-D …Actually, there is — please, re-tweet & re-blog the videos, as I am sure that they’ll be interesting to a lot of people! :)

I hope you will enjoy the videos, too! :-)