[ripecast] Webcast

On Thu, 6 May 2004, Colin Whittaker wrote:

> First off great job on the webcasts, really helpfull for those of us
> unable to make the meeting.
>
> Only thing I would ask is for is a higher bandwidth stream.
> Ideally 1.5megs or greater but 768k would be pretty good.
> It might be worth looking at multicast for the higher bitrates.

Currently we encode to three rates using a single encoding program, with
the assumption that people on modems can also view it.  The limitation is
that the lowest and the highest rate cannot be more than 200K/s apart
(this is from memory).

Higher bitrates is possible, but have a knock-on effect in terms of
bandwidth to our mirrors, storage space required and cpu time.

> Not knowing how you process the audio for the webcast but I would
> suggest that if it isn't possible to produce a seperate mix for
> broadcast then running the audio through a compressor might help smooth
> out the signal levels.
>
> Though a seperate mix would be ideal since it would over come those who
> wishper when asking questions.

Or those who assume that the microphone standing a metre from their mouth
is perfectly capable of picking up their voice without drowning the room
in a feedback howl.  We do use our own mixer in the audio feed, but quite
often we find that webcast operator is too busy with the cameras to adjust
the volume of the audio feed on a per-speaker level.  ( We do tend to get
out of practice between the meetings unfortunately )

-- 
                             Bruce Campbell                            RIPE
                   Systems/Network Engineer                             NCC
                 www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B             Operations/Security

      "Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even
                       one which cannot be justified on any other grounds."
                                                       -- J. Finnegan, USC.