super small

I have about 1100 .dv files totaling 3tb.  I pretty much have no clue what each 
file is, other than it was recorded at US PyCon 08.  There are 10 or so people 
that will help, so it seems the first step is to identify them all.

This plan is a little too labor intensive: buy 30 1t external drives, copy data, 
ship drives to people.  mainly because "copy data" means "plug in drive, start 
copy, check back in a few hours, repeat 30 times" which means I will be doing 
this dance for a week or something.

So I am considering this:  encode the hell out of them into something barley 
recognizable, throw it on my cable modem web server, and let these people pull 
them down, view enough to figure out what it is, log it to a database.

I think things can further be helped by only grabbing the first 5 or 10 min of 
each file (some files are 30 min, some are 6 hours.)

I might even be able to figure out how to hook up a web page that will let the 
person select a file and time, and give them a full res image file of that 
frame.  most talks start with the talk title projected on the screen, and being 
able to read that might be helpful.

For the "encode the hell out of them" part, any suggestions on what 
format/options I should try?

Carl K