Erik Johansson wrote:
On 3/28/06, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki <eric@zhevny.com> wrote:Herman Robak wrote:On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:19:45 +0200, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki <eric@zhevny.com> wrote:Herman Robak wrote:I am on the Debconf6 video team.Ah! will there be live streams of debconf6?I don't think so. We will try and publish the videos within a day.Hmm ... is there a technical reason not to stream them live? It is possible if you scale down the video. We (Joern Nettingsmeir and myself) did this last year for the Linux Audio Conference 2005 and will be doing it again for LAC2006. http://lac.zkm.de/2005/streaming.shtmlAt debconf5 we went for quality so we dumped the DV stream uncomrpessed from laptops directly to a LAN server or to an external disk. It was very hard to do two things at once e.g. if you sent it over the network you couldn't write to disk as well, since it would give drops in the firewire dump.
That makes a lot of sense. It may be another year or two before laptops with enough CPU to handle both full dv dumps and encoding are affordable. I guess for now, the only way around it that I can think of would be to have separate laptop and camera for full dump and for streaming.
but, wait, scratch that. Many cameras can send out the ieee1394 while they are writing to tape. Mine does this. I did that for that talk on Thursday. The firewire output fed the theora encoding chain for the live stream. And now after the talk I will play back the tape and capture it to disk for posting to the net. I guess that introduces a time lag for posting at least equivalent to the length of the talk. I've read that there are some cameras and miniDV decks that can play back at something like 4x speed ... hmm, well, just some ideas/brainstorming.
The reason we went for quality was that it was decided that the end result was more important than having the stream. With HQ dumps we could do some cutting/mixing afterwards. So no there was no technical reason, well we choose to do it in a way that hindered streaming.
Ok. Thanks for the explanation. I don't disagree with any of that at all. But, maybe there are some ways to have both full quality DV for editing and also provide streaming. Maybe just some more people and hardware resources would make it happen. I'm gradually assembling my own set of equipment for this type of thing and will be happy to bring it along to the next debconf7.
-Eric Rz.