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Re: [Debconf-video] Testing Nageru in parallel during DC17? [was: (Re: Report from last week-end's single-user single-day DebConf Video sprint)]



On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 06:45:30PM +0200, Richard Hartmann wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 6:25 PM, Wouter Verhelst <w@uter.be> wrote:
> 
> > For clarity, I'm not just talking about performance; I'm also talking
> > about the fact that mixing FullHD video on a single FullHD monitor is
> > difficult, so you'd need to have two monitors, or a 4K one, or to scale
> > your video as well as mix it. And then there's also the increased
> > bandwidth requirements of FullHD as opposed to 720p.
> 
> When I saw Nageru in action, this was not an issue and preview frames
> simply ran scaled in realtime on the same machine.

I mean network bandwidth for people watching the stream, not memory
bandwidth.

Last year, people complained at first because there was no 240p stream. We
added it.

Adding a FullHD stream is cute, but if people are then only going to
watch the downscaled 240p one, wtf are we doing again? ;-)

> > It's definitely something we need to be considering; but given that 720p
> > is already an improvement, not something urgent IMO.
> 
> Agreed; but jumping from SD to FHD, instead of HD ready, would even be
> nicer given it's 2017 and even cheap laptops have FHD displays; so
> people can consume this content.

Sure.

> > - We need to ship loads of hardware around the world all the time. For
> >   cameras this makes sense, since they are expensive to rent, but for
> >   laptops or computers (which can be borrowed or rented locally), not so
> >   much. If we want to use voctomix, we can just say "a reasonably recent
> >   processor". If we want to use Nageru, we need to say "a reasonably
> >   recent processor with a powerful enough display adapter that has a
> >   driver which is not crap". This is a slightly more problematic thing
> >   to do
> 
> I would argue that not shipping hardware around which needs N+2
> redundancy and simply using off-the-shelf Blackmagic boxes you can buy
> everywhere increases resilience.

I believe that has more to do with the fact that the Opsis boards are
open hardware, as opposed to the BlackMagic ones which very much aren't
(but must admit I'm not privy to the reasons as to why we chose that
solution). Eat your own dogfood etc.

[...]
> > - Nageru, given that it was written on top of Sesse's own video library,
> >   has less support for random hardware that we might want to use and/or
> >   connect to it. Granted, such support could be written, but that brings
> >   us back to the previous point.
> 
> I can't see Blackmagic going away; I get the point, but in the
> foreseeable future, this seems not to actually be a constraint.

I can't see Blackmagic going away either, but I *can* see another
manufacturer disrupting the market with interesting new cheap hardware.
I can see such people writing a gstreamer plugin, but not a nageru one,
and then we're a bit stuck.

[...]
> > And no video this year -- that isn't an option. Remember, our current
> > cameras are falling apart (and if they weren't, we're short a room).
> >
> > We need these cameras now, not in a few years.
> 
> Fully agreed.
> 
> I am not saying not to buy anything, I am merely saying that getting
> cameras which fit the current profile of 720p might save cost now and
> eg 4K cameras will be cheaper in a few years.

I actually investigated that when I sat down with my friend :-)

We looked at cameras which had
- 720p or better
- SDI out
- XLR in
- good low-light capabilities
- reasonable pricing (you can go to 15K EUR if you want, but...)

The three models I suggested fit those parameters. We looked for
something like two hours, but didn't find anything bettter.

I'm not in the business, so I'm not going to say that a camera which
does 720p but not FullHD and all of the above does not at all exist. But
it would seriously seriously surprise me if that was the case. Even
new handheld camcorders don't do 720p anymore.

If you can find a cheaper camera that does all of the above, by all
means do suggest. But I don't think you can.

> Though, as an aside, a mix of rental and buying seems to be more cost
> effective than buying all of them, plus shipping and insurance,
> anyway.

We are doing that -- renting audio equipment, borrowing computers and
other gear.

Renting cameras is what FOSDEM does, and they do get a reasonable price;
but FOSDEM has only one event per year for one weekend, whereas we have
more, and our longest is two weeks. By that time, renting cameras isn't
cheap or cost-effective anymore.

[...]

-- 
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?

  -- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
     Hacklab

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