This morning I uploaded version 0.1 of SReview, my video review and transcoding system, to Debian experimental. There's still some work to be done before it'll be perfectly easy to use by anyone, but I do think I've reached the point by now where it should have basic usability by now.

Quick HOWTO for how to use it:

• Enable Debian experimental
• Install the packages sreview-master, sreview-encoder, sreview-detect, and sreview-web. It's possible to install the four packages on different machines, but let's not go into too much detail there, yet.
• The installation will create an sreview user and database, and will start the sreview-web service on port 8080, listening only to localhost. The sreview-web package also ships with an apache configuration snippet that shows how to proxy it from the interwebs if you want to.
• Run sreview-config --action=dump. This will show you the current configuration of sreview. If you want to change something, either change it in /etc/sreview/config.pm, or just run sreview-config --set=variable=value --action=update.
• Run sreview-user -d --action=create -u <your email>. This will create an administrator user in the sreview database.
• Open a webbrowser, browse to http://localhost:8080/, and test whether you can log on.
• Write a script to insert the schedule of your event into the SReview database. Look at the debconf and fosdem scripts for inspiration if you need it. Yeah, that's something I still need to genericize, but I'm not quite sure yet how to do that.
• Either configure gridengine so that it will have the required queues and resources for SReview, or disable the qsub commands in the SReview state_actions configuration parameter (e.g., by way of sreview-config --action=update --set=state_actions=... or by editing /etc/sreview/config.pm).
• If you need notification, modify the state_actions entry for notification so that it sends out a notification (e.g., through an IRC bot or an email address, or something along those lines). Alternatively, enable the "anonreviews" option, so that the overview page has links to your talk.
• Review the inputglob and parse_re configuration parameters of SReview. The first should contain a filesystem glob that will find your raw assets; the second should parse the filename into room, year, month, day, hour, minute, and second, components. Look at the defaults of those options for examples (or just use those, and store your files as /srv/sreview/incoming/<room>/<year>-<month>-<day>/<hour>:<minute>:<second>.*).
• Provide an SVG file for opening credits, and point to it from the preroll_template configuration option.
• Provide an SVG or PNG file for closing credits, and point to it from the postroll_template resp postroll configuration option.
• Start recording, and watch SReview do its magic

There's still some bits of the above list that I want to make easier to do, and there's still some things that shouldn't be strictly necessary, but all in all, I think SReview has now reached a certain level of maturity that means I felt confident doing its first upload to Debian.

Did you try it out? Let me know what you think!