meeting A/V club

Thu May 24 23:49:48 UTC 2007

Any folks interested in improving the quality and formats available  
for the webcast of meetings?  What is the best way to fund such an  
effort - a specific fundraising drive, additional sponsor slot, ping  
the community for donations, etc?

The streams for RIPE, UKNOF, & LINX seem to be of high quality, I'm  
told they typically use 3 chip DV cameras.  Originally I was  
frustrating by the lack of available formats that merit/I2 make  
available; RealMedia has been taking a slow death in the mainstream  
space for some time, with H264 & WMV9 being the popular kids on the  
block these days (or FLV to be web 2.0 compliant).  Regardless, I  
think we can all appreciate the efforts that is put into archiving  
both the slides and video presentations, thanks merit & i2!   
Supporting additional formats is easy (ie: cluster of mini's,  
mencoder/ffmpeg one-liners, etc), improving the original source  
appears to be problem w/ the current setup.

Just as Anton Kapela has stepped up to vastly improve the WiFi at  
meetings, I'd like to help improve the webcasts.  Unfortuantly, while  
tkap was presented with quality WiFi gear (cisco enterprise non- 
linksys), the existing video setup is not so modern.  An investment  
of ~$10k would yield a number of 2nd hand DV cameras, firewire  
repeaters, a few macbooks and associated accessories.  Also using  
wirecast <http://www.varasoftware.com/products/wirecast/> w/ their  
"Desktop Presenter" add-on would vastly improve the current VGA to  
long-run-ole-Svideo setup; another trick of the LINX streams - this  
would require some speaker coordination though.

I'll be @ NOG40 and would be more then happy to discuss in more detail.

--Matt Peterson