Welcome to the official blog of the TV review team for WordPress.tv

We approve and publish all videos on WordPress.tv as well as help WordCamps with video post-production and captioning and subtitling of published videos.

We use this P2P2 “P2” is the name of the theme the blogs of make.wordpress.org use. When asked to post or view something “on the p2” by a member of the WPTV team, that usually means you’re asked to check https://make.wordpress.org/tv. to post our progress, status reports, and occasional geeky video debates. Use the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. to follow along!

Want to help us?

Video Editing — You can see what videos we have that need editing in this spreadsheet. No special credentials are needed, just download the raw video file, and use your favorite app to edit.

Get started here!

Subtitles/captions — You can help us extend the reach of of WordPress.tv by adding captions or subtitles to any published video. Just find your favorite video, and follow the steps here to create a caption/translation file and submit for review.

Weekly meetings

We use Slack for real-time communication. As contributors live all over the world, there are discussions happening at all hours of the day. We have weekly team meetings every Thursday at 17:00 UTC, and they are open to the public!

Our meeting is every Thursday at 15:00 UTC in the #wptv channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. (Find out more about Slack.)

You’re welcome to listen in, or say “hi!” We would love to have your help.

Ben Hansen 9:56 pm on September 22, 2015

WPTV on YouTube

A recurring conversation in our office hours has been the idea of utilizing our YouTube channel to help expand the reach of our content. The general consensus has been that reach should take priority over exclusivity in this endeavor, meaning we think as a group that all of our content should be automatically and instantly syndicated to our YouTube channel (ideally programmatically).

We are asking for community input to ensure that our consensus reflects the greater community’s goals so please feel free to share an opinion if you have one on this matter!

Jerry Bates (jerrysarcastic) 10:28 pm on September 22, 2015

I’m all for a YouTube channel as a way for us to better distribute our content. I think the sooner we do this, the better.

My only concern is one of manpower. If we want to share all our video, ideally we’d be able to attract a little dev attention with getting automated uploading if that is an option. Seems to be possible here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/uploading_a_video

In the short term, I think we can get something started (while building an auto upload tool) by manually uploading just our Featured videos, since that is a smaller stream to pull from. Thoughts? Anyone want to “own” something like that, or know someone who might?
Benjamin Cool 10:31 pm on September 22, 2015

I’d be willing to throw some dev time toward automating uploads to YouTube.
John Parkinson 12:07 am on September 23, 2015

I would be willing to help get started with the uploading.
Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 12:54 am on September 23, 2015

i think the main catch with automation will be the fact that videos are not instantly approved at time of upload which is when it would make the most sense to hand them off to youtube (from a technical point of view anyway i believe). Does anyone know if videopress stores the original upload so that we can automate at the point of approval?
- Ian Dunn 4:44 pm on September 23, 2015
  
  Can you elaborate on why it’d make the most sense from a technical perspective to push them to YouTube when they’re uploaded? I can’t think of why that would be the case.
  
  We have direct access to the MP4 file that VideoPress treats as the canonical video.
  - Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 4:47 pm on September 23, 2015
    
    because the file which would be submitted to youtube would be recompressed. much better to be submitting the original file in terms of video quality.
    - Ian Dunn 5:52 pm on September 23, 2015
      
      Ah, that’s a good point. I don’t think VideoPress saves the original file, but I could be wrong. We also may be able to tell the YouTube APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. to not compress it, or maybe the compression algorithms are idempotent.
      - Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 6:02 pm on September 23, 2015
        
        no you cannot tell YT not to transcode the file and each transcoding step will significantly impact the quality because they are very highly compressed for delivery. the only thing i can think of is if we submit the file at the time of upload but leave it private or unlisted until the metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. is added and it is approved we could then sync the info that was added and make public on youtube. obviously this would make the entire thing a bit more complicated and I’m not sure if the youtube api allows that kind access after the the initial upload. i do know it allows you to track the views externally so its possible i guess you can do other things as well. We also need to figure out how to handle things that are never approved so they don’t just stay in the YT account forever.
      - Ian Dunn 5:14 pm on September 25, 2015
        
        Good points Ben. I took a closer look and it seems like VideoPress does keep it the original, and that’s the video that’s used when downloading. So, we should be good there.
      - Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 5:17 pm on September 25, 2015
        
        yeah we were looking at it yesterday seems like the mp4 that shows up in the media library should be fine to use but are you saying there is someway to access the original file? if so it would probably still be better to use that.
      - Ian Dunn 5:41 pm on September 28, 2015
        
        I think the file that shows up in the Media Library^[1] is the original file.
        
        For example, if you open http://wordpress.tv/2015/03/13/tammie-lister-theme-dont-be-my-everything/, then click on Share, and view the link for “Original File”, it points to the same file that you get if you open it in the Media Library (https://wptv.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=44335&action=edit).
        
        [1] – I think this’ll be in whatever extension it was uploaded in, unless VideoPress is converting all files to MP4 without compressing them, and then treating that as the original, and creating the compressed files from it.
        
        Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 6:17 pm on September 28, 2015
        
        while it’s true that mp4 is a container format and not really a codec i don’t think I’ve ever seen any other uploader do anything like that and there are certainly formats that cannot be converted to mp4 without a transcoding step. At any rate, i think our group opinion was that original file quality is a pretty unpredictable variable and these things are already passing through a minimum of 3 or 4 transcoding steps before it gets uploaded anyway. That, the fact these types of videos are not particularly sensitive in terms of image quality and given the assumed easier automation of using these files, means the upside to trying something much more complicated just to reduce one step of visual degradation was marginal at best.
      - Michael 5:02 pm on September 29, 2015
        
        From what I can tell when a video is uploaded to WPTV it is converted to .mp4 and .ogv and it is renamed and four videos are created:
        
        videoid-fmt.ogv (400×224)
        videoid-std.mp4 (400×224)
        videoid-dvd.mp4 (640×360)
        videoid-hd.mp4 (1280×720)
        
        The original video (in original format and size) and name is retained if the media uploader was used.
        If the submit form was used then the video is renamed and I do not believe the original is retained.
        
        Even if a video was submitted in a 1920×1080 format the video is transcoded into a smaller 1280X720 format and that is what is seem on WPTV.
        
        I cannot find a video anywhere on WPTV that is viewed in 1920X1080.
      - Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 5:16 pm on September 29, 2015
        
        it seems it’s definitely being transcoded in all cases.
      - Michael 11:59 pm on September 29, 2015
        
        Yes. Not sure what is used to transcode but they are getting processed to these sizes with the largest video at 1280×720.
Oleg Belousov 6:59 am on September 23, 2015

Hey! Cool! I can help with the uploading the existent material. When we can start? I think it’s better to start with the oldest materials. We can create the Doc like for the videos to edit. Come on! 🙂

The importance is to start soon/now, then the helpers will arrive. 🙂
- Ian Dunn 4:46 pm on September 23, 2015
  
  I don’t see why we couldn’t automate uploading the archive too. I agree that it’d be best to have them in chronological order. Hopefully the APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. would let us set the date to control that, but even if it doesn’t we could just upload them sequentially to achieve that.
John Parkinson 1:02 pm on September 24, 2015

FYI: I collected this data for the WPTV presentation I did at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Columbus in late July. So far in 2015 597 videos have been published.

https://cldup.com/aJPkXYO92x.png
- Jerry Bates (jerrysarcastic) 5:00 pm on September 24, 2015
  
  That is awesome, though sadly off-pace for years past.
  - John Parkinson 6:16 pm on September 24, 2015
    
    True, it looks that way…..BUT….
    
    Aren’t there a few WordCamps that were held earlier in the year that have not submitted videos? I may be mistaken and if so, sorry.
    - Jerry Bates (jerrysarcastic) 7:43 pm on September 24, 2015
      
      For sure those can go up by quite a bit. Plus, overall I think that we are publishing better videos than we did in years past due to the work y’all are putting into post-production. Your stat doesn’t account for that, but I think it is huge. 🙂
- Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 6:24 pm on September 24, 2015
  
  yeah those numbers are on the move!

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