#2. There are a lot of considerations apart from bandwidth when it comes to disseminating information. For eg., having to use speakers or even reach for a set of headphones is reason enough for me to skip to the text.
I think csense meant bandwidth in the sense of rate at which the audience takes in the information, not network bandwidth. You're in agreement with one another.
Yes, by "lower-bandwidth" I meant "video usually [1] takes more of my time to transfer ideas from the author's mind into mine than equivalent text." I wasn't referring to bytes-on-the-wire [2].
[1] Sometimes video is more efficient than text. E.g. with respect to video games, gameplay videos can convey a lot of information in a short time. Basically if you want to teach someone about some system that changes over time, showing how it changes in video is often a lot clearer and faster than trying to describe it with words or static diagrams.
But a video that just involves listening to a person talk -- or, worse yet, read slides from a projector -- usually just ends up wasting my time compared to equivalent information presented as text.
[2] It's obvious that video consumes way more bytes-on-the-wire than text.
You're agreeing with csense without realizing it. He said "this website" to refer to the site with the videos (not the comment above him), and saying video is "lower-bandwidth" to mean that is less quickly communicative, not that it somehow takes less internet bandwidth than text.
Well I know of a few people who are really interested in seeing what these hacker people are like. Are they raving maniacs? Timid hermits?
Video is a good format to get people who do not normally browse source code or read specs interested. I'd rather send my curious-but-not-technologist friends a video link than a protocol design page from a wiki which they'll never read.
And a proper transcription encompasses a fair amount of work. So maybe the authors found that that would outweigh the benefit of pleasing some of us. I'm still happy that someone is creating these videos (and is not putting them on Youtube but is self-hosting them, with WebM HTML5 video).
I'm not saying that video doesn't have certain advantages. I think that some people -- even some people who consider themselves hackers -- may even prefer it.
I'm just saying that I personally prefer text, and explaining why I prefer it.
Other problem is when I read, I will often skip backwards and forwards and backwards again, re-digesting sentences that didn't quite make sense and cross-referencing especially within paragraphs. When I'm listening, I have to depend on my auditory buffer, which is only a couple seconds (or) one sentence long.
Exactly. With a well laid out webpage of text I can scan fairly quickly and get the gist - and also figure out how much time to spend on it or wherever to defer it etc. video only I tend to skip.
It's good that you mentioned it, but it should be said that the experience is far from perfect (at least in FF). Playback speed resets at every question break, each new video, etc. Audio drops out of sync frequently and seems to have more issues when sped up than in VLC.
I'm more comfortable downloading the lectures, but there are a few upsides to using their HTML5 player:
- When I speed up the video in VLC the pitch of the sound goes up. This doesn't happen for me in Chrome.
- You don't get the "in-video quizzes" when you download the lectures. Some courses put them up for download separately, for others there is no other way to get to them but through the online player. The quizzes don't typically (never?) count towards your final grade, but they can reinforce concepts and correct mistaken understanding early.
On the other hand,
- I have finer speed control in VLC, and
- The video players on my computer are just "nicer" than the web alternative, maybe better than a web alternative can be.
What's this all about?
Over the last few years, we've noticed quite a few people trying to spread the Internet out again. Back to the edges, like it used to be.
Sometimes they do it for privacy. Sometimes they do it for resilience against disaster. Sometimes they do it just to bring playfulness back to computers and how we use them.
We've a list of the kind of projects we mean (any missing? send a pull request). On this site, we interview one of those projects each month.
The problem isn't just "information bandwidth", but also an audio problem in a public environment. If you're in a public place, do you want to put your headphones on, or would you rather have everyone listen to what you're watching?
I'm also with you. I rarely have sound on, actually at the moment there seems to be a bug with my sound. I don't plan to investigate it. I strongly dislike video content.
If you're trying to engage people who enjoy watching lolcat videos every day, a video is probably the best medium to use.
But I suspect that the majority of the people who are likely to be interested in this topic (programmers, mathematicians, engineers, internet freedom activists) prefer to access the most information possible in the shortest time possible, accompanied by the least possible amount of unnecessary bytes, and in a format that allows quick skimming. Ergo, text.
This being said, some salient dot points could be put forward to summarise the videos and what they're about. As it stands, it's largely a mystery, and not an enticing one. There's no 'hook'.
Agreed, I can't watch football and this video at the same time. I can read and listen to football though. How dare you try to consume all of my bandwidth?
This is precisely the reaction that news sites get from me when I click on a link to a story and find video-only content.
Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of the interviews?