Re: [Debconf-video] Help: last review for videoteam text which goes to DC10 report
Hello everybody!
I'm helping Tiago with this. We have considered Holger's suggestions
and I have rephrased most of the text content, so please review it one
more time :)
Cheers,
Tássia.
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Title: The DebConf Video Team
Authors: Marco Túlio Gontijo e Silva
Holger Levsen
Tiago Bortoletto Vaz
Tássia Camões Araújo
DebConf is one of the most fruitful moments of Debian development throughout
the year. Even though most part of code is not necessarily written during those
days, many team meetings take place and it is a great opportunity for people to
share ideas and plan out what to do when the conference is over. This moment is
so important that those who want to take part in Debian but do not follow up
what happens during Debconf may feel like a fish out of water.
Thanks to the video team, DebConf is not limited to those who manage to be away
from home and work for one or two weeks. Two talk rooms were broadcasted all
along DebConf10 to the entire world and the footages were archived for future
access. During the talks, those who wanted to take part in a discussion, ask
questions or give feedbacks could use the IRC channels for each talk room and
someone at the venue would act as a communication relay.
Countless ideas have been proposed during Debconf talks and BOFs, discussed by
the audience (at the venue and remote) and worked on afterwards. As an example,
Joey Hess' Constantly Usable Testing proposal would have a minor impact if it
was not properly introduced for other developers. Furthermore, the talk was
archived thus prospective contributors still have access to it.
Setup
The video setup is mostly made of software components instead of expensive
proprietary hardware. Not surprisingly, all pieces are free software, hence one
can easily make use of the video team experience without major expenses.
Typically, there are cameras pointing to the speaker and audience, microphones
to get audio from the speaker, audience and ambiance, as well as a
slide capturing
device. The video is grabbed via firewire and transfered to the
central mixer through
a gigabit ethernet link. Using the DVswitch mixer, the director in charge
performs a live video mixing, switching between different video and audio
inputs and is even able to do picture-in-picture displays. From the mixer
machine, there is an uplink to the encoding server which then broadcasts to a
worldwide network of streaming servers. The resulting mixed stream is saved
for later archival encodings, along with redundant DV tapes recordings from the
main cameras.
Numbers
The DebConf videoteam has existed since DebConf5. Its work has been used at
numerous free software conferences, such as FOSDEM, LCA2011, PyCon and various
other events.
The Debconf10 video team consisted of 42 members (plus 4 honary members) listed
at http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Videoteam/Help. The outcome of this
collective work was the production of 76 videos during the conference, making
up 45 GB of processed data (out of roughly a terabyte unprocessed). All the
455 recorded videos from past Debconfs (starting from Debconf5) are available
for download at http://video.debian.net.
All in all video team effort seems to have pleased its followers as
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/Videoteam/Thanks shows. Thanks to those
who put their appreciation in words there - much appreciated! :)
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