[plug] Video Streaming Project

[James Bromberger]

Hello again World,

I've been looking for a project to get PLUG stuck into, and thought this may be of interest to a bunch of people.

Many of you may have watched some of the recent Linux.conf.au 2011 streams from Brisbane. The video streams I found were vital to getting to LCA, without leaving home, and opens up the presentation(s) to a much wider audience.

These streams use basic hardware and free software to produce video, but it takes a lot of coordination and 
knowledge to make it look good, something that the LCA AV teams practice.

I'm proposing that we put together a single-conference room set of equipment to be able to produce similar streams of our regular monthly presentations, using commodity hardware and open source software. DVswitch[1] and FreeJ projects already exists, and GStreamer[2] is an excellent framework. Putting this together, along with some DIY physical hardware hacking (booms/dollies/etc), and adding a bit of creative input from somewhere could mean we get to make the presentations available to people who can't make it on the night, and make it look reasonable.

My goal is to produce the video streams from end to end as a live presentation, with ZERO post-production, using commodity hardware and open source software, and documenting it should it need to be replicated in future multiple times (say, if there was ever a conference that needed it). We should aim to use newer technology and as much work flow automation as possible. We can hack away on DVswitch and other projects to help improve the presentation. If you're interested in this, please watch the LCA2011 video on making videos[3] (is that recursive?), and stay tuned; we'll have a hacking day one weekend coming up. If you've got experience with video production, jingles, animation, etc, then come and play. I'd like to see if we can put together something semi professional. And there's scope to play with all kinds of hacks.

If you're interested in playing with this, let ME know! I've set up a dedicated mailing list to reduce the noise on this list, and invite you to join: email av-subscribe at plug.org.au, or browse to: http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/av

I have discussed with Committee, and we're going to get the ball rolling on this; please help give it a shove!

Also, if you have a project you'd like to run, let committee know and we can give you a dedicated mailing list, and possibly help find some funding if you need equipment.

Have fun!

  James
[1] http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/
[2] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
[3] http://linuxconfau.blip.tv/file/4721989/

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