Re: [Debconf-video] DebConf16

Hi, saw this thread this morning, didn't get a chance to reply yet:

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 8:12 PM, Tim Ansell <mithro@mithis.com> wrote:

> That said, voctomix has not only been used as linux.conf.au, but also at
> several smaller events done by the CCC VOC. (They do a lot of events
> nowadays, alomst two per months (in the last year) I'd say. And at some,
> they have used voctomix.

That's great to know; I didn't know this was the case.

In that light, I think we should take the plunge and go with voctomix.
We'll have a full week to experiment with getting it to work properly;
that should be plenty.

voctomix was used in the main room at LCA and had a number of issues with the setup we were trying to use. I *think* most of these have been sorted, but I would make sure you had a backup plan for if voctomix doesn't work with your set up.

I'd definitely recommend trying to stick as close to the setup that the CCC VOC use for reduced hassles.

Voctomix is amazing and absolutely the way forward from dvswitch, but it's still early software and we hit some issues at LCA; we ended up rolling almost all rooms early in the conference back to dvswitch and had to babysit/restart various recording components throughout the day in the main room.

The main issues manifested as audio/video sync issues with the recorded data that occurred slowly over time (both blackmagic sources and DV/HDV - the latter sources are particularly problematic due to an apparent incomplete implementation of what's required to keep sources in sync with the rest of the pipeline). I'm intending on helping get these sorted before my next conference (Pycon AU in August).

The CCC guys appear to feed all sources back into a central blackmagic card with multiple inputs which is far more tested, where we were modelling our system much like how we've used dvswitch with sources being on remote machines connected via gigE and feeding streams over tcp.

There's a whole bunch of messy scripts I still need to clean up we used at https://github.com/xfxf/video-scripts - in particular https://github.com/xfxf/video-scripts/blob/master/carl/lca-voctomix-ingest.py will be of interest (script used to start up various 'sources' over the network to feed into voctomix's core).

I'd heavily encourage anybody interested to get involved and help the voctomix guys if you're keen on using it - they're very responsive on IRC.

I'd also heavily encourage you, if you go to voctomix, to look at it much longer than a week. I had tested it for a month straight recording loops, the LCA team had a full week hackfest before the event and even that wasn't enough as we hit new problems.