One year after the amazing and memorable conference that was held at the 20th anniversary of Swiss-Prot we’ve made all the talks available on Google Video. Here’s a starting point. I heard it’s going to be a rainy weekend ;-)

Technical Note

The quality of the recordings wasn’t great. I finally managed to get something watchable without too much effort with help of the following tools:

  • TMPGEnc XPress was used to extract the videos from the DVDs on which we got them, clean up and boost the audio signal, and encode the result as DivX movies.
  • Audacity was used to clean up the audio of the keynote speech (which was so bad that TMPGEnc XPress failed).
  • VirtualDubMod was used to boost the audio level of all talks further (TMPGEnc XPress can only do 500%), merge back the audio of the keynote speech, and to trim some movies. All of this could be done very fast as VirtualDubMod does not need to re-encode the movies for such operations.

The reason for choosing Google Video over the more popular YouTube or the more specialized DnaTube site was that it didn’t have their upload limitations (max file size 100MB). The main drawback of Google Video is that it doesn’t allow you to create sets of movies that belong together – it seems you can’t even link to e.g. all movies from a specific publisher! But of course this is less of a problem than not being able to even upload your movies…