Hey all, I've spent an evening and a day working on video stuff last week-end, using the opportunity of a pair of lent cameras to do some work. I've put some pictures up at https://krkr.eu/dcvideo/ Here's what I can report: Camera testing -------------- I had both the Sony PXW-X70 and the JVC GY-HM200E set up. Both cameras are largely similar in functionality and feature set, and they work just fine with the vocto setup. I recorded to YouTube : https://youtu.be/BleLh5hXICY; at the beginning of the video, the JVC is on the left, the Sony on the right; I switched them out at 12 minutes : most of the video has Sony on the left and JVC on the right. The differences I could notice were: - Low light behavior: using dawn and the blinds in the room allowed me to test for crappy light conditions (reminder: at those timecodes, Left = Sony, Right = JVC) test 1 : https://youtu.be/BleLh5hXICY?t=9282 test 2 : https://youtu.be/BleLh5hXICY?t=10293 feel free to stroll through that video for more tests. What I noticed: The JVC high gain for low light setting is manual and fiddly; Sony has proper automatic gain control. The JVC's auto white balance is slow, the Sony seems to do the right thing pretty fast even in very bad conditions (playing with blinds, light switches, ...). The JVC also was very grainy when fully zoomed in and in low light (see the very beginning of the video). - Size: the Sony is substantially smaller than the JVC and we should be able to fit two in a case the size of the ones we've been using for the dvswitch laptops. - SDI connectivity: the Sony does SDI-6g (up to 4k) while the JVC does not (AFAICT, pegging the SDI to 1080p). Not very useful for us, but who knows what we'll do in the future... - Audio input setup: I only had batteries for the tests (no AC adapter) and I noticed the Sony would lose audio input settings when rebooting. As it defaulted to shoe mic it's not a showstopper. Also the silly stuff like phone remote control works... IMO the Sony is superior to the JVC, mostly thanks to its smaller size and better low light behavior. Happy to hear opinions. Streaming setup --------------- I had a very productive chat with markvandenborre, member of the FOSDEM team. They use nginx with the RTMP module to get the feeds out of the rooms into HLS, then a bunch of nginx caching frontends to back video.fosdem.org. I think that's a setup that we will be able to easily replicate. I adapted the Debian nginx package to build the RTMP module, and then set that up to get video from the encoder cube and stream to YouTube (and locally). The result is what you get on the link above, i.e. 8.5 hours of uninterrupted streaming. CPU usage was pretty low, I think thanks to hardware acceleration of H264 on the i7 of the cube. nginx-rtmp-module does the multiplexing, so we can stream to our own CDN and to YouTube in parallel if we wish to. The behavior is miles ahead from icecast: the most egregious example is : clients will not drop out when the stream fails to push to nginx, while icecast would hang up on people. There's still a bunch of things to figure out (most notably, what CDN we use to deliver to users), but it seems that the way forward is clear. Opsis ----- I talked with mithro and got the "Faulty" Opsis flashed with the most recent pre-built firmware without a hitch. It seems to work fine with that version. That's enough for tonight :) See you during the meeting on Wednesday, -- Nicolas Dandrimont BOFH excuse #347: The rubber band broke
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature