Tue, 07 Feb 2012
Video at FOSDEM 2012
A year ago, during FOSDEM 2011, I walked up to the NamurLUG folks who'd been doing video coverage of FOSDEM for years, and suggested that this year, maybe they should consider using dvswitch for video coverage. While they seemed agreeable to this idea, they simply had not had the time to look at it in detail, and were therefore not using it. Since I've used dvswitch in the past, both as part of the DebConf video team and for my own concert recordings, I reasoned this a problem that could be solved by joining the video team.
However, when it came to be time to start preparing for FOSDEM 2012, we found that many of the NamurLUG people were not going to have as much time to prepare for video coverage as they had during past years, and therefore responsibility of FOSDEM video coverage fell entirely to me. This was fairly unexpected, though not too daunting.
For those of you who don't know dvswitch very well: a typical dvswitch installation for coverage of a talk requires:
- Two cameras; one to capture the speaker, one to capture audience members asking questions.
- A twinpact 100, used to convert a VGA output into a DV stream that we can load into dvswitch
- Three laptops: one for the audience camera, one for the twinpact, and one for the speaker camera and the dvswitch installation
- A GigE network between the three laptops, with an uplink to do streaming
- A large amount of diskspace to store the recordings on. Since dvswitch records in raw DV, you require approximately 13GB per hour of recorded video.
- Some powerful systems to do transcoding from DV to a streaming format such as Ogg Theora or WebM
- A fairly extensive audio setup: one wireless headset microphone for the speaker, one or two wireless handheld microphones for people in the audience, and a number of microphones at select positions in the room to pick up ambient noise (which for obvious reasons you don't want to overdo on, but which if done well makes the audio on your recording sound much more natural). This also requires a mixing console.
- And last but not least a (network of) streaming server(s) to do the streaming to people watching from home.
This is a rather large amount of work, and therefore it is not too unexpected that for DebConf, the DebConf video team takes a week to properly set up two rooms so that they can be used for recording. However, for FOSDEM we only have less than a day on-site to set up things, and we were going to cover five rooms. So, I tried to cut corners as much as possible:
- We were going to work with one camera per room, rather than two. Not only would this reduce the number of required volunteers (of which I wasn't sure yet at that point how I'd find them), it would also reduce the amount of preparation needing to be done, and it would reduce the number of things that could go wrong.
- We were going to have the network team do our network, rather than try to do it ourselves. The result was that we were not going to have to lay out cables, cut them, crimp connectors on them, test them, etc, and would only need to worry about using the network, instead of building it.
- Since I'd read Thomas' announcement about an ''offer I cannot refuse'', I contacted him to see about that offer and get it all set up for FOSDEM. This way, I wouldn't have to worry about streaming servers etc, instead just about getting a stream on the network, into a flumotion server running somewhere; and after that, it would no longer be my problem.
- I decided to simplify the audio setup somewhat, and not use ambient mics. These are nice, but not essential, so we could do without them, and that would be (at least) two microphones per room that the team wouldn't have to rent, place, wire up, and tune.
So in the end, I would need to take care of ten firewire-capable laptops, five cameras, five mixing consoles, several microphones, a number of transcoding machines, and shitloads of cabling (power, firewire, and audio). And about a week or two before the conference, as the massiveness of what we were about to do started to sink in, I was starting to have bad dreams of what would happen, wondering what I'd gotten myself into this time.
Now, one day after FOSDEM, I have to say it all turned out okay, but there are some things where there's still room for improvement. So that I don't forget, I thought I'd make a list of things that went well, and one of things that didn't go well. And since that might be interesting for other people, I thought I'd do it here, rather than in a private file.
First, things that did not go so well:
- Set-up for some rooms took more time than we had, and as such some rooms did not get properly streamed or recorded for their first few talks. This was due to the fact that there was some confused communication between some members of the team, which meant that we lost a day that we'd planned for preparation, and as such we couldn't test as much as we'd hoped. We need to improve on that next year. Ideally, we should run the full set-up somewhere, with all cameras and all laptops running, and making sure that everything is ready to be set up and that we have every cable we need, before dividing everything over a number of boxes (one per room) and bringing it to the conference.
- While some of our cameras were semi-professional Panasonic cameras that had a balanced XLR audio input, others were much lower-level camcorder-style cameras that did not have such a thing. When a camera has a good audio input, it's fairly easy to set up a link from the mixing console to the camera and get the audio into the stream that way. When a camera does not have such a thing, the set-up gets much more complex. Since we had so much to worry about, we did not notice that in one room, on saturday, something went wrong with audio. To combat this, we should improve on our audio set-up for next year, and also verify the streams every once in a while (I did the latter on sunday, so everything should be fine there).
- Inherent to an ad-hoc network, there were some network-related
issues. For instance, on sunday evening, during the last session in that
room, Ben informed me
that the link to room H.1301 had gone down. As we were investigating, we
easily found the source of the problem:
The cable had been put under a door, and had been 'protected' with loads and loads of duct tape, but apparently that wasn't enough. This wasn't something we wanted to fix anymore, at that point; instead, we just let the cable be and focused on other things. - Storage. None of the systems used for the recordings were my own; instead, some were owned by IRILL and some were rented. If I want to do anything with my recordings, that means I have to copy the data off. The system I chose was to bring a USB3 hard disk and copy everything over; but for saturday, this took an hour and thirty minutes. On sunday, my USB3 disk was fairly full, so I had to revert to a USB2 one, which increased the time by much. In the end, we had to abort copying files, and we'll now have to be a bit creative to get them.
- Volunteer management. I originally set up a wiki page to allow people to sign up for talks that they wanted to help out with. Unfortunately, that didn't work so well as it did for DebConf; there were several talks that did not have enough people, resulting in the volunteers from the previous talk remaining on post and finishing their talk. Also, there were some people that signed up without contacting me, or without telling me what name they used on the wiki page, which made it somewhat harder to know who to talk to. I lost count of who had signed up to help out. On Sunday, I decided to set up an IRC channel instead, through which volunteers could communicate more directly and just ask for people to take over, instead of registering for a talk first and then hoping nobody would forget. Also, since I'm terribly bad with faces and video volunteers did not have anything that made them stand out from the rest, I couldn't just walk around until I would see someone involved with video work and ask them to take over in a room. Having a separate 'video team' t-shirt could help there.
After the bad news, here's the list of things that did go well:
- Streaming. Even though choosing flumotion rather than icecast (as we'd done for streaming in the past) involved extra work for me before the conference (I had to write some code so that I could stream from dvswitch into flumotion, which wasn't possible out of the box), the guys at Flumotion decided to send over one of their support engineers. As such, I simply did not have to worry about streaming servers crashing or failing to do what they were supposed to do. While I have no reason to think any of the Flumotion servers were having issues, even if they were I wouldn't have known about it, since Francesc took care of it all and never ever required my involvement about something on the flumotion side. This was extremely valuable.
- Training right before the welcome talk. Explaining to people in a few words how dvswitch works, and then immediately following that up with a live demonstration, isn't a bad way for them to understand.
- Despite all the problems we did have, once everything had been set up and all the gear was more or less manned, actually recording and streaming did go fairly well. The feedback I received so far was mostly positive, which makes me very happy.
In the end, while there certainly is still room for improvement and things did not go as smoothly as I'd hoped, they have gone much better than my worst fears. There's still some work to do, which I'll be doing with the NamurLUG people this week, but all in all, it's gone pretty good.
As to the usage of the streams, I asked Flumotion for some statistics. Since I was fairly late in asking, they could only provide me with statistics about sunday:
- Number of clients connecting:
- Traffic:
Mon, 10 Jan 2011
Going
Obviously.
In contrast to what I claimed a few years ago, I am now also part of the FOSDEM info team, the central team that organizes this great meeting that happens every year in Brussels, Belgium. Currently, my involvement is limited to doing the same things that I did last year (except then by actually being part of the team rather than talking to them through mail), but this might change for future editions.
These "things" involve organizing the cross-distro development room. The schedule isn't finalized yet (that'll happen sometime later this week), but interested parties can go have a look at the list of proposed talks for the cross-distro devroom. There's an interesting lot, IMO.
Fri, 12 Feb 2010
FOSDEM 2010...
... is over (for almost a week now), and it was a blast again.
If you went to one of the distro devrooms, I would appreciate it if you were to reply to this mail. We need feedback to improve stuff for next year.
Thanks.
In related news, I've uploaded the slides of my (unexpectedly horrendously successful) talk here
Tue, 26 Jan 2010
Going, obviously
If you thought otherwise, you're crazy, but just for reference:
This year I volunteered to organize the "distributions" devroom/track, because it seemed to be going nowhere, and the people who where supposed to do so were too busy with other stuff. I'm still not very fond of the idea of mixing all distributions in one room, but at least we managed to avoid complete and utter disaster wherein nearly no talks would have been submitted.
Let's see how it goes, now.
Sat, 14 Feb 2009
Debian @ FOSDEM 2009: Postmortem
Well, no, neither FOSDEM nor Debian are dead. But FOSDEM '09 is gone, over, and dealt with.
It was a breeze, for the most part. I'm still not very happy with the booth; that needs to be done better next year. Help and suggestions in that area are more than welcome.
One thing that more than deserves a follow-up is Lucas' post about FOSDEM:
On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop's release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there's always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job. Frans' talk boiled down to: "The release team doesn't know what they are doing, I would have done much better because I'm so qualified."
As the person responsible for allowing Frans on the schedule in the first place, while being fully aware of the relationship between Frans and the release team (not at first, but certainly in time to kick him off if I'd have wanted to), I'd like to comment on that.
First of all, I do not agree that the last statement in the above is true. Frans showed a few stories of things that went on in the release team, and gave his opinion on what he believed went wrong. He also explicitly said, at the beginning of the talk, that none of the talk was meant personally; that he wanted to offer some constructive criticism instead. I believe he did not fail in doing that, but of course YMMV.
Secondly, and more importantly, I do not believe it is healthy for
Debian (or any project, for that matter) to reject criticism. Indeed,
nobody is claiming perfection. I do not believe any venue where talks
can be had should be a good news show
. People in a position of
power—not just the release team, but also, say, the DPL,
ftp-masters, buildd maintainers and whatnot—have received our
trust to do what they need to do to the best of their abilities. If
someone in the project would believe that I can significantly improve my
work as buildd maintainer, it is not just their right, but indeed their
duty to inform me of that fact. This is exactly what Frans was
attempting to do, and there is nothing wrong with that.
It is also not as if he's not tried reasoning with the release team first. He has made suggestions, which have gotten ignored. I feel that talking to more people about what he feels is right, to see whether they agree with him, is the next logical step to take, and that this it is exactly what Frans was attempting to do at FOSDEM.
Having said that, I agree that finishing the talk late was a very bad thing. If anything, a talk on a subject like this should have more, not less, time for discussion. So while I do not agree that his intentions were wrong, I do agree that the execution could have been better.
There, that was criticism too. Now, what's next?
Oh yes, suggestions. If people have suggestions on how to improve the Debian presence at FOSDEM next year (especially, as above, ideas for creative use of the booth would be welcome), then please send me an email, making sure the subject contains the word 'FOSDEM', so my mailfilters know what to do with it. You'll preferably do so now, while FOSDEM is still somewhat fresh in your memory; I'll take notes and use those for doing better next year.
Thanks,
Sun, 18 Jan 2009
FOSDEM Debian Devroom: annotated schedule
FOSDEM is a 2-day weekend of insanity. 218 talks this year; if you want to understand exactly how insane that is, have a look at the schedule grid. There are 19 rooms where events are held; possibly more, since I understand not every devroom has sent in its schedule yet.
Might be hard for people to make a choice that way, I guess.
Now there're supposed to be abstracts of each talk on the FOSDEM website, but reading them all can be quite tedius. In an effort to help, at least for the Debian devroom, here's the schedule for our devroom with a bit of explanation of what it's about. Note that this is mainly aimed at people not familiar with Debian; those who are should probably understand it enough by looking at the titles.
Saturday:
13:00 - 14:00: 'Outside broadcast on a budget - the DebConf video team and DVswitch'. DVswitch is the software used to create those excellent Debian videos. The best ones yet, IMO, are the ones of Debconf8. Check them out. There's nothing Debian-specific about DVswitch, except that it was written by Debian people. It's a great way to do live Internet .ogg streaming by using nothing more than DV cams, Firewire, and plain old Ethernet.
14:00 - 15:00: 'Ultimate Debian Database: datamining Debian made easy!'. UDD is a SQL database containing a shitload of data related to Debian, and which should allow easy datamining. Hence the title. This probably won't be of any interest to people who are not either a Debian Developer or a statistician, but I might be mistaken.
15:00 - 16:00: 'Introducing DDE, Debian Data Export'. This is a new project Enrico came up with, and which is related to the same subject as the previous talk. I don't know much more beyond what's in the abstract. However, given the fact that Enrico is going to be doing this talk, it can't be bad. Seriously.
16:00 - 17:00: 'The Debian status quo on the Openmoko Neo Freerunner'. Yup, Debian runs on the OpenMoko, and has done so since Debconf8, last august. This talk should give some more insight; if you have an OpenMoko, this definately is for you.
17:00 - 17:30: 'Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices'. I've been running Debian on a Thecus N2100 for a few years now, and it's great. There are more options, however, and Martin does most of the hard work related to these devices. He's done a similar talk on the two previous FOSDEMs (go check out the videos), and this one will mainly be an update on what's going to be new in Lenny.
17:30 - 18:15: 'Grid Computing with Debian, Globus and ARC'. These guys are a group of academics from three different universities who've been doing grid computing (i.e., something like 'SETI@Home', but then somewhat different) with Debian and some other technologies. They'll be explaining how, exactly. I don't know much about this talk; it could be great, or it could fail miserably. I guess we'll see.
18:15 - 19:00: 'What does the DPL do?'. This is really firmly targetted at Debian people. If you're not in the least interested in how Debian does things, you'll be bored.
Sunday
09:15 - 10:00: 'The state of Virtualization in Debian'. If you're a Debian user interested in virtualization, this talk is for you. Henning will explain what virtualization options exist in the upcoming 'Lenny' release, and how to use them.
10:00 - 11:00: 'TDebs'. This might not be too interesting to you unless you happen to be involved in Debian infrastructure. TDebs don't exist yet, but will sometime soon; Neil will be explaining how, why, and what.
11:00 - 12:00: 'Internationalization in Debian: How to improve further?' If you're interested in i18n, this is probably for you.
12:00 - 13:00: 'The Common Debian Build System (CDBS)'. CDBS is one way to build a Debian package. This is probably only of interest to Debian people.
13:00 - 14:00: 'Release management in Debian - can we do better?'. Frans isn't a member of the release team, but has some criticism on how they function. He intends to present his arguments in order to start a discussion. This is Debian internal kitchery, really.
14:00 - 15:00: 'Lenny - the road to release'. Neil is a member of the release team, and is going to explain how we got to the current state. I hope he'll also explain why we still haven't released. I guess we'll see :-)
15:00 - 16:00: 'The long road to KDE4 in Debian'. Um, yeah. I'm not a KDE guy, but I understand some other people are. In any case, might be an interesting talk even if you don't use Debian, since I understand it will look at some of the new features in KDE (and how they relate to packaging).
16:00 - 17:00: 'Debian and Google Summer of Code 2008: wrap-up and insights'. I guess Leslie will be there. The speaker was a student working on Debian during this year's SoC, and he will present what's been accomplished.
There, that's it. Now my only hope is that there'll be many people attending. If previous editions are any indication, however, that won't be a problem.
Of course I am
In case there was any doubt:
Not that I think there was, but, well.
In related news, there've been some minor updates to the devroom schedule, especially on saturday. If you were interested in some of the saturday talks, you'd better go have a look.
Sun, 24 Feb 2008
FOSDEM, day two
This is no doubt one of the best FOSDEMs, ever. At least to me it was, and I've been to every FOSDEM, and to the second day of the original OSDEM as well. Great weather, great people, great talks, and great fun. What more can one want? Where I had to nag about a few things yesterday, today I can only feel exhausted, but happy.
Some loose ends:
- Apparently someone forgot a camera in the Debian Developer's room; this is a Kodak EasyShare ZD710. If you're quick, you may be able to still get it at the info desk; otherwise, contact either me or "Chipzz" on the Freenode network (perhaps in the #fosdem channel). If you're still in Belgium, we may arrange for you to pick it up, otherwise we'll have to send it to you.
- Thijs said it after the last talk in the Debian devroom, but let me repeat it here: if you have comments about the Debian presence at FOSDEM (and I mean about any subject, really), just let me know. This was a great FOSDEM already, but there's always room for improvement. Oh, and yes, we need a bigger devroom, and the FOSDEM people know this, and they can't really help us but they'll do what they can. Unfortunately "too many people" is a general problem at FOSDEM.
See you next year!
FOSDEM 2008: Day one
Day one of FOSDEM 2008 has now ended, and almost everything seems to have gone fine from my end. Note, "fine" is not "perfect"; there were some issues.
- Unfortunately, Lars fell ill, and couldn't make it. Shame; I was actually looking forward to meeting him again. Fortunately, Frans Pop offered to hold a replacement talk, and that talk went well, given the low amount of time he had to prepare it.
- The Debian developer's room is now really too small. Last year, we were having issues with the room being too full to accomodate new attendees, but this was very much dependent on the actual talk going on; the room couldn't accomodate the audience for all the most popular talks, but in general there were no issues. In contrast, this year around I haven't yet seen the room not being too small.
- The security staff sucks. Again, they kicked us out of the DevRoom before the agreed-upon time of 19:00. I'll need to remember that for next year, and not try to assign talks until the very last moment; perhaps stop by 18:45 or so...
- The idea to let my hair grow to prove to Nattie that it's ugly that way seems to have failed to meet its purpose. Darn. This is the last time I'll come up with such a lousy excuse for allowing my hair to grow.
- I've been slacking with things, and not following up on stuff people sent me mails about. As a result, I needed to fix some things at the last minute while the event was already underway. Silly me. Most things worked out nicely, however; and the booth—I think I shouldn't bother to make up a schedule anymore next year.
Nothing spectacularly problematic; and as for the last item, that can be easily fixed by introducing fresh blood in organizing the Debian side of FOSDEM next year. Not that I want to stop being involved, but at least not being the only one responsible might be sensible.
Other than that, no real issues, really. Well, except for one; I was so backlogged with everything that I had to postpone finishing my slides 'till the very last moment—half an hour ago. Ugh.
But, well. Great FOSDEM!
Thu, 21 Feb 2008
my FOSDEM TODO list
In less than two days, and I still have loads to do
- Clean the office. The floor is pretty dirty right now, no place to lay down guests.
- Pack my bags. I host guests at the office, which requires me to sleep there, too.
- Figure out a solution for the booth (I did get some volunteers, but did not follow up on that yet).
- Write two sets of slides: one for my talk about the Belgian eID card in Debian, one for the key signing party, which I'm also organizing
- Clean out my SD cards, so that I can actually take pictures. This involves some sorting out of what needs to be kept and what not, etc.
Most of this has to be done this evening. And all this while feeling horrible; I think I'm sick again. If I didn't have to give this perl training, I'd have stayed at home today.
Here's for hoping I'll feel better during the weekend. And that I'll get everything done by tonight.
Some mail is welcome in /dev/null. Real mail, however, is welcome at my email address
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