bwh

This is a few years old, but I hadn't seen it before: 44-nation survey of attitudes to globalisation and technology. I found the results on pages 12 (loss of culture) and 19 (the Internet vs TV) particularly interesting. But also note how questions about individual aspects of globalisation get more positive responses (pages 21-27) than the explicit question about globalisation (page 41). As usual, it seems like a lot of respondents haven't thought things through!

I fixed the known bugs in WebDVD, renamed it to VideoLink and uploaded it to Debian. To get it into Debian, I had to make it work with Mozilla/XULRunner 1.8 (roughly the same code base as Firefox 1.5) since Mozilla 1.7 is no longer supported. In the process of doing that I also fixed a bug in setting the nominal screen resolution - I tell Mozilla it's 40 dpi because I reckon that's the average resolution when the video is played full-screen - which is likely to change existing layouts. The sarge version still seems to ignore the claimed screen resolution which I'll need to investigate and fix as I really don't want layout to depend on which version of Mozilla was used.

I have stopped procrastinating on finishing off the DebConf video files, put all the information I have into a database and used that to work out what's left to do. The answer to that was, not that much really. Based on the database you can see the status of all the recordings and final files which shows that we have all the final files for all the official sessions. About 20 of the final files (mostly Theora unscaled versions) have still to be uploaded, which will take a few days over my 448 kbps uplink. (Due to a deficiency of my schema, the lightning talks are shown as not having final files. Actually they just weren't split up into separate files.)

I'm intending to produce 3 DVDs this time - two for DebConf sessions and one for Debian Day plus any Spanish-language material from DebConf - because these recordings just won't fit on 2 single-layer DVDs. There should be room for some extras such as Biella's recordings and the day trip, which I have still to deal with. I need to sort out menus for the DVDs. Please suggest good background pictures that can be distributed under the DebConf video licence.

Most of my photographs are now developed, scanned and uploaded to gallery.debconf.org. There are another 14 still in my camera though.

As for moving pictures, some of the session videos are now available from meetings-archive.debian.net. There's a big status table showing how this is progressing.

Due to this bug and some rather late checking, we're some way off producing finished videos. The video storage/encoding servers are now with gigio who's very kindly helping to fix this.

It started with a swirl of tables in a huge shed. Then came the rain, the mariachis, the fight, the power cut, and eventually the whole thing faded away. No speeches and not much fun. Guess Ted Walther got what he wanted.

Yesterday we found some problems with our streaming set-up that hadn't appeared in the short time we had to test it beforehand. Firstly, due to a misconfiguration, the 10 Mbps link from the Parliamentary Tower to our network became congested with broadcast traffic. This seems to have been fixed, though I don't know the details. Secondly, at times when the picture kept changing, the encoding machine was unable to encode it in real time. We believe we've fixed this by using libtheora-mmx in place of the standard libtheora. Finally, we weren't able to set up both internal and external Icecast servers, and to save bandwidth we had to stop people at Debconf from streaming from the external servers. We have fixed this with the aid of some new NAT and firewall rules.

If you're at Debconf you can use http://video:8000/hacklab.ogg or http://video:8000/tower.ogg.

If you're outside, carry on using video.debconf.org. One of the servers has gone down due to a disk failure, but should be back later. In the mean time we should be able to add more relay servers.

Today we got access to all the audio equipment and the remaining cables we needed in our main venue, the Parliamentary Tower. We've worked out locations of the various equipment (projectors, screens, speakers, microphones, camera, computers) and wired them all together. We were unable to get a sight-line for a wireless link from the tower to the rest of our network, but the centre finally agreed to let us use their house network for this purpose. We have to go through a 10 Mbps hub, but it should be sufficient. Finally this evening we were able to test streaming video and audio from the camera and mixer in the tower down to the rest of the network. The tower is now closed, but we will test from the hacklab to the outside world tonight. Fingers crossed, Debian Day should go live to the world tomorrow!

At Debconf we'll be having talks in the Parliamentary Tower and some other sessions in a room by the hacklab. In each of these rooms there will be one small quiet computer capturing video from the camera over Firewire, connected by Ethernet to a second computer (preferably outside the room) with more disk space and processor power, which will record, transcode and stream the video to the outside world.

On the first of these we just need to pipe dvgrab into netcat. On the second we need to netcat to a file and simultaneously feed that file into the transcoding and streaming software (ffmpeg2theora and oggfwd). Since our link to the Internet may not be reliable (and certainly isn't now) we expect that streaming may lag behind; that's where dvtail (which I mentioned previously) comes in.

Having identified the various pieces of the video puzzle, last night I actually wrote the scripts to do this. I didn't have a chance to test them properly, so they didn't actually work. Today I packaged them, fixed various silly bugs, and tried them on some of the computers we plan to use. This was stalled for a stupidly long time by the lack of Internet access, since Ganneff had planned to create users on an LDAP server elsewhere and then use a local LDAP cache, rather than create them entirely locally. Eventually we ended up with user accounts created on each machine. Next problem: we attached a camera to a Powerbook G4 and got nothing but errors from the Firewire driver and dvgrab. We tried changing cameras, cables, kernel versions, but with no success. Changing the kernel itself was a problem without access to backports. I was cursing the air blue and banging my head against the wall in frustration.

Finally we tried using different computers, and suddenly everything worked. I had missed one option to ffmpeg2theora, but once I added that we were able to stream across the LAN. Of course, that won't be of much use if we don't get the Internet connection working much better soon.

Nattie (tea_cantata) and I arrived safely in Mexico and have been fairly busy since then, while not blocked by lack of network access.

The Debian archive mirror prepared by Steve made it here safely and is now attached to our main server. Yay for USB2.

Video team preparations are a bit behind schedule but we are just about to do a smoke test with cameras and computers (but no audio mixer yet). I have backported Icecast 2.3 and Ffmpeg2Theora to sarge, and written a "dvtail" program to read the DV recordings for streaming, so that problems with our Internet link won't break recording or result in a huge lag in the streams.

I have also had to make and lay out a 100m power extension cable for a switch in the middle of a 200m stretch of network cable. This requiring fixing the crappy extension socket shut with a hammer, jumping^Wclimbing from rooftop to rooftop with cable, and then untangling it under a baking sun.

I'm loving the spicy food here, though I think I can do without jelly as a "vegetarian" dessert (I think this mistake will not be repeated) and may have to ask for refritos sin queso (without cheese). The heat is bearable and my hat and sun cream have so far protected me from sun burn. The insects are horribly noisy, but one eventually tunes them out, like the noise of fans.

[Poll #719955]