Intro
After months of wrestling with Google Drive and YouTube Studio, we finally managed to get the 2025 and 2026 Flock to Fedora livestream sessions ready for release. The videos are now available on our PeerTube and YouTube channels. This post walks through the entire journey from raw footage to final upload, sharing everything we learned along the way—from tool selection to FFMPEG configuration.
The Famous Last Words
On my way back from Prague after Flock to Fedora 2026, I remember thinking, “How hard can it be to upload session recordings to YouTube?” It didn’t take long to feel humbled. When I reached out to Justin Wheeler (the former Fedora Community Architect) for the livestream files, I was surprised to learn there was already a process in place—so at least I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
A couple of years earlier, Adrian Edwards had built tooling to streamline the whole pipeline—slicing, thumbnail generation, metadata tagging (is that even a word?), and uploading to our YouTube channel. There were definitely adjustments needed to the documented process, but since the 2025 uploads were already partially complete, it gave us a solid foundation. Meanwhile, the 2026 recordings hadn’t arrived yet, so I had some breathing room to get familiar with the existing workflow.
Defective Detective
The first hurdle was embarrassingly simple: the file paths for grouping the footage were all wrong. Flock to Fedora 2025 spanned four days (June 4–7, 2025) across four tracks—Plenary, Topaz, Opal, and Quartz—which meant untangling a messy pile of recordings. Since we were already a year behind on uploading the 2025 sessions, we decided to take our time and get it right.
I brought on Shounak Dey, a fellow Fedora Infrastructure contributor who had previously helped me with the Fedora Badges Revamp Project, to lend a hand. He kept detailed spreadsheets mapping footage files to their session times, which let us move quickly to the next step. Although I initially tried using SponsorBlock to mark timestamps, I soon went back to simply eyeballing them in VLC Media Player.
More Hands, Quick Hands
Delegation was crucial. While Shounak manually annotated video timestamps, I focused on slicing the sessions using LosslessCut. Adrian’s Python scripts proved extremely handy, and Justin gave Shounak the necessary access, so the only real bottleneck was network bandwidth. We noted several documentation improvements to make later once the processing was done.
Justin and I had planned a phased release strategy: sessions would go live on PeerTube first, then later on YouTube. Gradually releasing on both platforms would help maintain audience interest and relevance. In the meantime, we had to be patient. I was easing back into my regular work while writing up my event report for the Flock to Fedora 2026 conference.
Where Are Those Templates?
The processing scripts and documentation were available, but I still had to hunt for the thumbnail templates. To make matters worse, those files lived in a separate repository, so contributors less involved in the project would have a hard time finding them on their own. Shounak kept noting documentation improvements he planned to make after we finished processing both the 2025 and 2026 livestreams.
Adding to the frustration, the InkScape plugin for generating thumbnails with the NextGenerator Addon was quite buggy. Honestly, I was at my wit’s end—I’m no designer and had no clue how to adjust the output from that flaky extension. Fortunately, with help from Emma Kidney and Madeline Peck, we managed to pull it together as they started creating the templates for the 2026 edition of Flock to Fedora.
Lay of the Land
By the last week of June 2026, the Flock to Fedora 2026 footage had arrived. I already had access to the Fedora Project’s YouTube channel from my time with Fedora Websites and Apps, so I started uploading sessions as unlisted videos. The hard-won experience from processing the 2025 footage gave us a clear roadmap, and things moved much faster once we got past the initial tooling growing pains.
I concentrated on uploading the 2025 clips to Google Drive so Justin could later publish them on PeerTube. Meanwhile, Shounak officially joined the Marketing Team. We chased down some missing recordings with Dorota Volavkova for weeks, but without success, and ultimately had to settle for the lower-quality YouTube VODs. We were gradually closing in on the finish line—or so we thought.
No Audio? No Problemo!
This week brought a fresh challenge: about ten of our uploaded Flock to Fedora 2025 videos had no audio. The source audio tracks were in PCM format and hadn’t been muxed into the MP4 files correctly. We needed to losslessly convert the PCM audio to AAC first. A YouTube viewer’s comment alerted us to the issue. We had to unlist the affected videos and re-upload fixed versions as separate entries.
While Shounak pushed forward with documentation updates, I tackled the audio problem head-on, since it needed fixing as quickly as possible—the late 2025 uploads were already a sore point. After spending nearly half a day digging into FFMPEG‘s configuration options and documenting them, I handed the corrected session recordings back to Justin so he could reschedule their release.
Outro
One of the best ways to solve a problem is to face it directly before rolling up your sleeves. What I initially thought would be a small, low-impact contribution ended up involving many aspects of the Fedora Project’s community processes. In the end, we not only got the 2025 and 2026 videos published, but we also paved the way for future volunteers to handle upcoming events.
