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When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time
Where: irc.binrev.net #media
What: Linux Multimedia "extra content" Sprint
Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there's no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let's band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.
Promos
1 Minute Promo with Music
1 Minute Promo, add your own music
26 Second Promo
OS X and Windows, as mutlimedia solutions, come loaded with lots of great bits and pieces of raw material for a multimedia artist; ie, audio loops, sound fx, photoshop (or similar) brushes, textures, patterns, fonts galore, and so on and so on.
Linux multimedia distros do not do this because logistically the task is enormous. You have to get permission from each person who has made a given sound loop, sound effect, brush, texture, pattern, font, soundfont, and so on -- to include their asset in your distro. Since many of the content creators don't even know what Linux is, or don't see any point to having their work included in some niche free operating system, or else the only contact info you have for them is some out-of-date email you've gleaned from an old deviantart.com profile page that they no longer use -- your emails requesting permission to use their asset often goes either ignored or refused.
Consider that every single user who wants to build a truly robust Linux-based multimedia studio would have to go hunt for free art materials.
A good collection of fonts for a graphic artist can easily reach 1000 files. Soundfonts for a musician might reach 400 files. Brushes and textures would easily reach 100 files. That's just the beginning -- and already it's about 1500 files to download!
Assuming there are 10 people who want to do this, then they will collectively download well over 15,000 files in probably twice as many clicks. This is not only inefficient, but it's actually harmful to a website's bandwidth.
Now imagine 100 people going to these extremes; that's 150,000 files being downloaded separately, all for the same purpose.
Common sense, expediency, logic, and the unix philosophy demand a better solution. The solution of course is to share the labour of downloading all of these assets. I've started this by downloading over 350 soundfonts and hundreds of fonts; the soundfonts are now available online at: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5251517. I intend to do the same for the free and re-distributable fonts I've downloaded.
However, the more people downloading assets, the faster the process will be. And so I'm going to hold a Multimedia Materials Sprint. We shall meet via IRC on irc.binrev.net, in a channel called #media and we will coordinate who is going to download what. We will then post all the collected material to a server, and I will gather this material together, place them in logical bzip archives, create torrents, and post the torrent files on thepiratebay.com I will link to the torrents from Slackermedia.info and any multimedia user of ANY Linux distribution or even any operating system will be able to benefit from our labour and from the free content available online.
The date I've chosen to do this is January 26th. We'll start at 14:00 EST and go until 06:00, that is, a grand total of 16 hours. This is not specific to any distribution (or even any OS, technically) so everyone is invited to help out. You don't have to stay the full 16 hours, but definitely stop in and see what you can do to help. Just sign on to irc.binrev.net and join channel #media and say hi to "notKlaatu" and join in the fun.
EOF