[PLUG-AV] Summary from tonights workshop.

[James Bromberger]

Hi all,
So Harry M, Tim B, Michael (who came along on Monday to the pub) and I
met at Artifactory tonight. All equipment went together and powered on,
and we had a few test streams that were seen by Peter in Katanning and
Tim in Qld, with feedback coming to us over IRC. We put Av2 (the AMD
machine) though its paces. We found that we could stream at 3/4 of SD
resolution at 15 fps and 9,600 KBps mono audio and sit on a load average
of around 1.8; it was a little laggy, but that could have been the
uplink from Artifactory. Using PiP at this size is not do-able - it adds
too much load to the host on top of the compression.

We also found that the best place for the audio mic was - attached to
the new $50 camera we just bought, which has an audio input.

We seem to be missing a VGA cable from the Twinpact, so we need to find
one to replace it (standard VGA cable). indeed, we should probably cater
for one spare as well, and as Tim pointed out, BigW or KMart were/are
selling firewire cables for $10 or so, so two spares of those would be good.

Time to turn to the grant situation - which we got cut short of tonight.
I propose that we architect our solution that, with the aid of the
grant, we get beefy box to run DVswitch, and second beefy box to do
encoding. Using the Dell Optplex 990SF spec - two of those at $1,345
(inc GST). We should then get some much cheaper SFF boxes to replace the
camera capture boxes. The biggest question right now remains a source
for cameras, and the right tripod to pair with it. But ball park:

* Beefy servers: 2 x $1,345 = $2,690
* Camera servers: 3 x $500? = $1,500
* Tripods: 2 x $200 = $400
* Camera: 1 x $500 = $500

That's $5,090, and we havent added another radio mic, or any wired mics
and adaptors to the mix yet (or HDMI capture if we have to go that route).

But we need to identify the Australian retail prices (and suppliers).
Does someone have time to spec up with Dell for Small Form Factor camera
servers (use the PLUG details form the last quote).

  James

-- 
/Mobile:/ +61 422 166 708, /Email:/ james_AT_rcpt.to
PLUG President 2011: http//www.plug.org.au
Perth.pm Organiser 2011: http://perth.pm.org
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