[plug] PLUG Meeting this week - Tues 7:30pm.

[James Bromberger]

On 12/04/2011 11:55 PM, Bret Busby wrote:
> Me missus and me, also watched it here, across the 'net, and we were impressed.
>
> We encountered background noise (from downstairs at the UCC?) that
> drowned out alot of what Harry was saying, for a while (it sounded
> like an ongoing fight or something, in the background), then it
> appeared to be filtered out (somewhere around 8:o'clock, I think). I
> assume that the background noise was filtered out, when it was put
> through the MacBook? (I heard it said, at the end, that a MacBook had
> been used partway through)

Yes; we had plugged the receiver of the wireless lapel mic into the one
camera we had (mine, quite old) and without the manual had ASSUMED that
the 3.5mm jack was audio in. Jason was studious enough to find, download
and read the manual, to discover it was audio OUT, not IN; up until that
point the audio capture had been the on-board mic. We then scrambled to
find another audio input (not mic input, but line input) somewhere on
our working machines to feed this in. Audio quality is probably the
highest priority item for next time.

Much of the noise was the gamers in Unigames; UCCans were relatively
quiet! Despite having cornered them in a room with a closed door, there
were air vents to let them continue breathing, which was how much of the
noise was escaping!

>
> The video image appeared to be 360x288 resolution (what was the camera
> used?), and, when the picture was just of Harry sitting at the
> desk/table, with the paraphenalia, the image looked fairly good. Was
> any extra lighting used, in additional to the normal light in the
> room?

The camera was a 10+ year old JVC, standard mini-DV camera. The original
video was on the locla LAn at 720x576 @ 25 fps or so, and we scaled that
down to what you saw, still at 25fps (potentially), and still with the
original audio at 16 bit 48KHz. Audio could probably have been better
compressed, and video frames could have possibly dropped to 20 or so.
These are things for us to play with.

>
> One thing - in using the totem Movie Player, when I tried to take the
> totem window to full screen, the application crashed, each time that I
> tried. I have not encountered this before, with watching videoclips on
> the 'net.  Is that problem due to the video being live streaming
> video? It was running here  on Ubuntu 10.04, running on a portable
> (large "laptop") computer, with a 17" LCD screen (a proper screen, not
> a "widescreen").

I'd probably say it was an encoding issue. The encoder did crash out on
us a few times at the start, but seemed pretty stable for most of the
meeting. We were using "ffmpeg2theora", piped to "oggfwd" to send to the
Icecast server on Pot, PLUG's virtual machine.

> This was the first time that I have watched live streaming video on a
> computer, that I remember, and we were both impressed, and look
> forward to more in the future.
> Thank you for the broadcast.

Yay! Another happy customer.

As I've rambled on before, if anyone on PLUG list wants to help out,
please join the AV list. We're currently using DVswitch, and have some
ideas for extending it if anyone wants to help out).
http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/av

-- 
Mobile: +61 422 166 708, Email: james_AT_rcpt.to