BurnStation

Overview

The burnstation will be something like a video version of http://www.burnstation.org . It will be something like a kiosk, where people can browse and watch videos, then select the ones they like and copy them to a removable medium.

Rationale

The rationale is to allow for video distribution in areas with limited Internet bandwidth, reliability, or infrastructure. Online video is only viable in areas with good Internet infrastructure. Local video archives seek to work around this by keeping content locally for local viewing, but still mainly restrict the viewer to the physical location of the archive, like a non-lending library. DVD and VCD players are highly available, even in less developed countries. Allowing a user to visit a video archive, choose the videos they like, burn to a DVD/VCD, and take home, or distribute to friends/relatives would increase video distribution in these areas.

Required Features

* Video browsing and viewing
* Selection of videos to burn
* Transcoding to MPEG2
* Burning to DVD/VCD
* Saving to USB disk

Implementation Ideas

This would need to be built as an 'appliance' rather than a general purpose computer. The local archives projects currently run plumi for video hosting, which delivers the video via a web browser. Burning discs via a web browser seems a difficult proposition, so a seperate application is needed. Miro provides an interface to browse and download video feeds. It incorporates vlc player, which is capable of transcoding video. It may be a good platform to modify to serve this purpose, as many of the required features are already in place. Creating a disc could be done by creating a playlist, then clicking a 'burn to disc' button.

Miro could be modified so the miroguide page (home page visited when the app is started) points to the local archive rather than the general miro page. Some discussion has already taken place at TransmissionMiroPlayer.

This also has the scope for allowing access to external videos over a flaky connection, as miro can already do bittorrent downloads. Some restrictions might be needed, however, to not exceed the site's network capabilities.

Platform

Initially this would be developed for the Linux platform. While the scope of this project doesn't require a cross-platform solution, Miro is already a cross platform player, and everything but the actual burning part shouldn't be platform specific, so it may be possible to easily extend this to be a general solution.