Videos & Slides: Stories in Open Source

Back last year in June 2023 I was lucky to speak at lambda days 2023 about one of my favorite topics: Open Source! And it’s not just Open Source, but it’s my story in Open Source and my journey throughout Open Source – so far. As such, it’s by far the most personal talk I’ve ever given. So, within the talk you won’t just learn about how to run Open Source projects, how to contribute to Open Source projects and how to get better at something – but you’ll also learn about where I went for ERASMUS, my connection to Ukraine and the health situation of bunnies. I swear it makes sense in context!

You can also find the slides at speakerdeck, slideshare or as a PDF

Abstract

What’s it like to work on Open Source projects? They’re all the same aren’t they? No, they’re not – the longer I worked on Open Source the more I realize how different the experience is for each one of them. Walk with me through some stories that happened to me in Open Source and let’s see what we can take away.

Video: Shoes talk at JRubyConf 2013

Finally the video of my talk at JRubyConf 2013 in Berlin is online. It was my first full length talk at a conference, I gave it almost a year ago – some difficulties with the video material and getting it online caused this delay. Nonetheless it is finally here! The talk was titled “Shoes – the Ruby Way to GUI applications” and now  you can go ahead and watch it or you can watch all the other amazing talks.

While that is a bit old, some of the information isn’t up to date anymore. Most importantly about what still needs to be implemented as we made tremendous progress so far. We have a preview release and are happily looking into the future 🙂

HTML5 <video> and <audio> – supported formats and browser compatibility

With HTML5 video and audio tags are here and ready for use to easily enhance your websites with audio and video. The tags are available in all major browsers now, except for Opera Mini (audio video). You even got popcorn.js to interact with the media, make you web pages react to the progress of a video and build cool new media enriched websites.

The major problem with HTML5 media though so far has been browser support for the different media formats/codecs. Support has gotten a lot better – not great, but better. At the time of this writing it seems like you only have to offer 2 different formats for audio and video to support a wide range of browsers.

Disclaimer: I didn’t try this all out manually. I trust the data for Browser compatibility I found on the Internet: Mozilla Developer Network media format support, Wikipedia(HTML5 audio, HTML5 video)

Audio

Support mp3 and Ogg Vorbis – you can use other formats in place of ogg as well (and AAC in place of mp3).

Video

Support H.264 (.mp4) + Theora (.ogv) or VP8 (WebM) should do the trick.

On a last not, if you want to convert video files you can use ffmpeg, e.g. for instance theora/.ogv to H.264/WebM:

ffmpeg -i demo.ogv -f mp4 demo.mp4

Hope that this helped 🙂