Re: [Debconf-video] Special meeting for the 1st sprint - August 10th from 19:00 to 20:00

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2016 at 02:48:49PM +1000, Tim Ansell wrote:
> Europe is a long way away, so it is unlikely for me to attend in person,
> however, I'll aim to be around (remotely) to help with Opsis and HDMI2USB
> related stuff.
> 
> It would also be good for you to describe / document some of the issues you
> had with the Opsis so we better understand your user experience. There is
> such a huge amount of things we can do to improve things that it is
> frequently hard to know what the best thing to work on is.

So some of the problems, the ones I can currently remember:
- In the rooms that were using dvswitch I think we had to manually
  switch between 1024x768 and 720p depending on how the laptop was
  connected.  This involves a script that echos character per
  character a bunch of commands to get things working.  I think we
  actally scripted it so it would try each of the scripts in turn.
  I think our HDMI to VGA convertor only does 1 mode or something,
  and it might not be the mode it's currently set to.
- We at least had cases where we ended up windowboxed, probably
  both letterboxing and pillarboxing happened somewhere in the
  flow.  I think this relates to people making their slides for
  4:3, but then display it in a 16:9 mode (and so pillarbox it),
  and then we want it in 4:3 and so letterbox it again.
- We had laptop that just didn't work with it and they had to use
  someone else's laptop.  I think that even was one who gave many
  presenations at other places and never had a problem.
- In the room using voctomix it's showing a few green dots at
  random places for a frame and then they go away or go somewhere
  else.

I think many of the problems have to do that it only announces 1
video mode.  It really should announce a whole bunch of them and
then scale down to the resolution we want.  I think we should just
tell it what resolution we want out of it.  I'm not sure if that
should involve it only announcing 4:3 or 16:9 modes, but it should
probably announce both and then try to detect that it's being
letterboxed or pillarboxed and when it would do the reverse it
should instead try to throw it away.

I guess we could also live with undoing the letterboxing and
pillarboxing manually, and there should probably be an option to
do that manually since it might not always be black.  But I would
really prefer that you just plug it in and that it does the right
thing by default.


Kurt