What are your thoughts around videos on the Portal?
Hi everyone,
Do you use videos on the Portal? If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts around it - what you like/don't like, what works for you/doesn't work, features you'd like to see that we don't currently offer. Even if you don't use videos, I'd love to hear why not. Were you aware that we offered features like chapters, subtitles, PDF downloads of presentations?
Any feedback is valuable as we continue to refine and polish our content.
Much thanks!
Sean
Responses
Really hate 'em!
I'd rather have plain text.
Videos use my bandwidth up, annoy neighbors, aren't searchable, and can't readily be saved to refer back to.
Just my HO.
-BF
Red Hat
Expert
876 points
Hey Brad, thanks for giving us feedback! I wanted to address a couple of your comments to hopefully encourage you to give videos another chance:
- With regard to bandwidth, we use .mp4 with h.264 encoding and off of that produce another .ogv file for the Linux crowd. The result is a small file that buffers quickly and minimizes bandwidth usage.
- Searchable videos are possible, we could add a transcript of the video which would allow searching, it's just not a feature we've seen demand for. We do, however, use tags and keywords to help customers find content not only on the Portal, but in Google as well.
- We also added chapters to any video 4+ min long, so you can quickly get to the part that's most relevant to you.
- Non-savable videos is a fair observation. We copyright all our video content, which is premium and part of the subscription you pay for, so we don't want that work being redistributed outside of the Customer Portal. Eventually, though, I would love to have a bookmarking feature where a video could resume from last playback, but alas, it's not today.
I hope this helps clarify things, and if you have any suggestions for what would encourage you to watch videos, I'd love to hear them!
Guru
6827 points
I have kinda recently found the discussions area, and the videos I think are fine. I have only watched a couple by Dave Egts that were very useful. That being said, I kinda forget that the videos are there - I'll check them out more
Hi Sean,
Thanks for starting the thread!
I find the videos on the portal quite useful and something I would like to see more of, but I have a few comments:
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The instructional videos are at times very light on with details and feel rushed (RHEV videos come to mind). I understand that they are there to supplement other material, but some explanation as to why you "click here, change this, click there, done" in the video would be nice. I think the level of technical info should be somewhere between where the portal videos are now and the CBT Nuggets videos. I find with CBT Nuggets you regularly end up putting in fast forward because there is too much 'noise' in what is happening. This is actually a broader comment about Red Hat documentation consistency in general. Recently I have been reading content from the site and noticing that the 'why' isn't explained terribly well, just the 'how'. Nothing bothers me more than just doing something because that is what the documentation says rather than an explanation about why settings need to be changed (or what goal is actually trying to be achieved in a section).
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The inline player is frustrating. The default size is too small to see the detail in the screen grabs and the only other option is full screen. I would much prefer being able to download them to watch them at a decent size through the player of my choice (have I missed the direct download option somewhere??).
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The Red Hat Summit videos are excellent for tech preview (JBoss EAP migration / systemd introduction come to mind) but they lack polish. They feel too 'LUG' like for Red Hat. My major complaints are that the interjections from the audience are usually inaudible, so even though the discussions they spawn are valuable, it is frustrating not knowing the original point/question that was raised. I also find the same issue when it comes to the questions/comments section in the video.
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I think I playlist would be useful. ie. you can queue multiple videos up and watch them in order and then come back to / resume the playlist when it's convenient. I would also find it useful
As for new content I would like to see.. I would definitely like to see more around the inner workings / decision making at Red Hat rather than just instructional / product promotion. eg. Representatives from Red Hat not only explaining what changes to expect in RHEL 7, but why those changes were made. I felt that the systemd video did a really great job of this and would love to see a broader video addressing design decisions made involving the base Red Hat platform (as they make them). A video on why Red Hat chose to align with OpenStack/Gluster/GFS/KVM and other technologies (many may be obvious, but would still be interesting to see how these decisions are made)
Red Hat
25369 points
Thanks very much for the detailed feedback - we'll definitely take this into consideration.
Red Hat
Expert
876 points
Hey there, thanks for the feedback! We always welcome constructive criticism that can help improve our content.
To address your points:
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This is excellent feedback. We often struggle with detail (in video content anyway), so it's heartening to hear that this is what customers want. We always want to make sure that we're giving you enough information that it's useful, so I've passed this feedback on to our content team to help ensure that we cover the why as much as the how.
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Understood. Would it help if we offered a pop-out player that you could resize as you see fit? We can't offer videos for download, unfortunately, because they're copyrighted to the Portal. This is part of the premium content you pay for in your subscription, so we don't want them being redistributed elsewhere. We can, however, make modifications to your viewing experience :)
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I'm not sure what 'LUG' refers to, but I agree that audience feedback during Summit videos is sub-optimal. We mic the speaker and record that directly to the camera, but we do not have a boom mic for the audience, so capturing their questions/comments in clear audio is challenging at best. I will pass this feedback on to the Summit team for this year to see if we can improve this.
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Interesting idea. I'll take this to the Portal development team to see what they think.
Thanks also for suggesting new content, we're always looking for topics! In regard to why Red Hat chose to align with OpenStack, we do have this video from a year ago that outlined our strategy and how we integrated into the OpenStack community - https://access.redhat.com/site/videos/320763
Hope that's helpful and again thanks for reaching out to us!
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Yeah, I think a resizable pop out player would be handy. When you think of the end user that is watching technical / instructional videos they are likely working through the application at the same time so want to be able to throw the video up in a corner and watch it while they work.
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'LUG' = Linux User Group. My experience of LUG videos has been varied eg. sometimes someone will throw a phone camera on a table and then the lecturer walking in and out of shot, audio dropping, slides being half cut off etc. Usually they are a 'best effort' so I understand the quality when given the constraints.. but with an epic budget like Red Hat I am sure you can add some polish! Some of the Summit videos I have watched have the lecturer/presenter repeating the questions which is a good habit to have, and does help us remote viewers understand what is going on!
While I have the floor I will add another minor point!
- Product versioning in regards to video content. I often find I will fire up a video for a product and it will be for an older version, but I will only notice this when I am half way in and subtle differences to the UI start popping up. For example, the Red Hat Storage videos that have been posted recently don't say which version of Red Hat Storage they are for. It's great at the moment because they are for the latest release but it will be difficult to line up the tutorial with your installed version in future. I think having product version information (searchable) for the videos will ensure they provide value as they age as not all sites run the latest versions of software (for all manner of reasons).
Red Hat
Expert
876 points
- Will see what I can do to get that added to the upcoming features list, sounds reasonable!
- This is very true, but one point to mention is that clear audio from the speaker is always our first priority. Typically Summit videos on the Portal will have the slides cut into them, so we're less worried about visual quality and more concerned with audio. We try to have the presenter repeat questions as much as possible, so I will pass that along for this year as well. We will also try to capture audience questions as best as possible.
- Once upon a time we had versions as part of the metadata for a video's page. We stopped using it because we found either (a) customers were using several different versions of that product and we only had a video for one particular version; and (b) the video might apply to several versions of the product, so listing just one didn't make sense. Storage, as you point out, seems to be an exception.
What we can do is start including the version # in either the title or description if that's helpful.
Thanks as always for the discussion, this is really great stuff!
Sorry to dig this up again, but I finally got a chance to go through the storage videos and there is a perfect example of what I raised in point 1. in regards to lack of explanation for selecting certain options.
In the video 'Creating a distributed volume" at approximately 9:00 the video instructs you to specify the vers=3 option for nfs when mounting (with no further explanation). Admittedly I can go read the documentation to find out why this is (if there is a sound reason), but even a minor explanation in the video would add a huge amount of value.
eg. (not actual reasons.. just used as an example)
"We are going to specify NFS version 3 when mounting the filesystem..."
" ..because we have found that this provides the best performance"
" ..because gluster with NFS 4 is not currently supported by Red Hat"
" ..because the client used in this demonstration only supports version 3"
other than that.. (and a few audio drop outs).. I thought they were great videos.
Thanks for the suggestion and we will keep that in mind in future productions. The vers=3 is for using NFS version3 which is the supported option in Red Hat Storage ver 2.1. In the recent release of Red Hat Storage 2.1 Update2 on Feb 25 2014, NFS Ganesha was introduced as a Tech Preview feature to enable NFS v4 functionality in Red Hat Storage Server.
Guru
6827 points
Just wondering, Is there any chance on getting some of the videos from the Tampa Customer Convergence (2014) slides that were posted recently?
I did find these below, but not sure if they correspond to the slides...
From Jeremy Eder's Blog, led to this link on performance tuning, 2013 RH Summit links,
- part one video on performance tuning, 2013 RH Summit.
- and part two video on performance tuning, 2013 RH Summit,
The both are about 51 minutes
Red Hat
Expert
876 points
Hi Remmele,
Unfortunately we were not able to record the Customer Convergence event, but since you mentioned Performance Tuning from 2013 Summit, I should let you know that we are planning on recording that topic at this year's Summit, so you'll have a chance to catch it in about a month. Stay tuned!
For what it's worth, and if this is still a valid point of discussion, providing video content that isn't dependent on Flash is my major point of contention.
Guru
6827 points
I noticed from the access.redhat.com portal, thee's no real menu to go to videos. I did put in a search term in the search box, and then saw a tab that said "browse" and selected it. Then there's a square to select named "Videos", but if one didn't know to go through that process, they might not even find the videos, or know they exist.
ADDED: Anyone landing at this discussion, as I type this, here is the link to the videos https://access.redhat.com/search/#/videos.
Hi, since Ansible is Red Hat, I thought I'd get to see some videos related, unfortunately, could not find either puppet or ansible in the list. Hope to see these videos...
Community Member
44 points
Videos on portal!! good initiative. sometimes they are more explanatory than the text. I personally always prefer the videos tutorials. It saves a lot on time as well. And the best part what I like is we can actually see the commands being run and what is expected solution/procedure which is not always possible to present in text.
I would like to see feature where we can upload small (in size) videos to start the post, showing tech issues.
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