Two New Videos: SuperPages and NanoBSD

Thanks to Kirk McKusick, I'm happy to announce two new fully edited high quality videos from BSDCan 2011 in the BSD Conferences YouTube channel. I've also created a new playlist for the BSDCan 2011 videos.

The first talk is "Superpages in FreeBSD" by McKusick, and it describes the addition of superpage support to the FreeBSD 8 kernel on the Intel PC architecture. Superpages aggregate together standard-sized hardware pages into much larger "superpages". Each superpage requires only one entry in the page table replacing the numerous entries used by the standard-sized hardware pages.



The second talk is "Updates from NanoBSD: FreeNAS drives NanoBSD development" from Warner Losh, and it describes the basics of NanoBSD and how FreeNAS moved over to NanoBSD.



We now have 108 high-quality videos in the BSD Conferences channel. These videos have been watched in aggregate over 400,000 times, and our most popular video remains McKusick's FreeBSD Kernel Internals Lecture.

As a reminder, this channel was setup specifically for the BSD technical community and does not have the standard limitations on video size for other types of YouTube uploads. If you have additional video content from a conference, presentation, or class about BSD Unix please get in touch and I'd be happy to help you publish the content here.

Kirk McKusick on Journaling Soft Updates in FreeBSD

Dr. Kirk McKusick has produced a high quality recording of his talk on Journaled Soft-Updates at BSDCan 2010. This is the 92nd BSD conference video in the BSD Conferences YouTube channel.

Improved Conference Captions from Amazon Mechanical Turk

Just wanted to send a quick note that three of the popular videos from the BSD Conferences YouTube channel have been updated with human-edited English language caption files. These offer a significant improvement over the machine generated captions I wrote about last month.

The following videos have been updated:

• PC-BSD, Matt Olander, AsiaBSDCon 2008 (transcript text)
  
• FreeBSD Kernel Internals, Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick (transcript text)
  
• A Narrative History of BSD, Dr. Kirk McKusick (transcript text)
  

I've also posted three simple captions text files which provide the times and text in a very simple ascii format in case anyone wants to provide a diff to improve any remaining mistakes in the captions.

The transcriptions were done with the help of the industrious workers behind Amazon Mechanical Turk. The three transcripts above, representing at least 6 person hours of work, but easily twice that much time, were completed for less than $50 by leveraging the timing information from free machine generated captions and mechanical turk for the editing. This is less than 1/10th of the cost of a commercial transcription service.

What is the quality of these captions in other languages when automatically translated with YouTube? Are there any other videos for which captions would particularly be useful?

AsiaBSDCon is coming up in March, and I hope to have things streamlined by then such that videos with both Japanese and English captions can be added to the channel shortly after the conference.

Machine generated captions for BSD conference videos

One of the most frequent requests I've received, since Launching the BSD Conferences YouTube channel last year, has been for captions in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and other languages. I was excited last month when Google announced automatic captions for Youtube videos using machine translation. This feature is still highly experimental but I am happy to report that it has been enabled for the BSD Conferences channel. In combination with the much more mature automatic translation feature, this means that captions are now available in over 50 languages from Afrikaans to Vietnamese for most of the 73 videos in the BSD Conferences channel.

The automatic captions are still highly experimental and the quality of transcription for highly technical content spoken by a diverse set of international speakers is a significant challenge to get right. If you are interested in helping to correct any of the English transcripts I would be happy to provide you a simple text file of the transcription, with each line offering the start and end time for the caption to be displayed, and the caption text. One advantage of the machine translation is that the most time consuming part of manually creating captions, synchronizing the timing of the text with the speech, has been done automatically. Even when the technical words are mangled, the timing information in the automatic captions files can be leveraged to make the process of manually improving the captioning much easier.

The experimental automatic captions are only available directly from the video watch pages, and not from channel pages or other views. For example, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwbqBdghh6E to see one of our most popular videos, Kirk McKusick speaking on FreeBSD Kernel Internals. Hover over the triangle at the bottom right of the video, then over the CC submenu and select "Transcribe Audio". You can then choose to "Translate Captions" into a different language as well.

A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem

Two new videos are available from AsiaBSDCon 2008, including :

* A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem, Kirk McKusick.
* Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods, Brooks Davis

It has been less than two months since I posted Dr. Kirk McKusick's Kernel Internals video and the popularity of this video has been stunning. The 11,000 views in less than 2 months makes it by far the most popular video in the bsdconferences channel.

FreeBSD Kernel Internals Lecture Posted

The first lecture from Kirk McKusick's full length FreeBSD Kernel Internals course has been posted to the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube. It's been about 10 years since I first took a shortened version of this course at FreeBSDCon 1999, and only a few years since I took the follow up kernel code reading course in Berkeley, and I highly recommend this unique resource to others.



This makes the 24th video uploaded to the BSD Conferences channel since I created it just over a month ago. Thanks to Julian Elisher, Jason Dixon, Tomasz Dudzisz, and Kirk McKusick for uploading the conference videos and for contributing to our growing page of tips about video production and publishing on the FreeBSD Wiki.

As of this writing we have 644 unique subscribers to the channel and approximately 400 daily views of these videos. To date the most popular videos have been Kris Kennaway speaking about the New features in FreeBSD 7 at MeetBSD 2007, and Jason Dixon's tongue-in-cheek BSD is Dying talk at NYCBSDCon 2006. Note to conference organizers: high level talks about the new features, or talks by speakers as entertaining as Jason Dixon are likely to be well received. The YouTube analytics to the right show the top 10 most popular videos from the channel as well as some demographic information.