[hackerspaces] November 2010 - Synchronous Hackathon

[Robert Fitzsimons]

> Our space is totally down for this, one question though I noticed on the
> page it lists Ustream links. We've had real success with Justin.tv, not so
> much with Ustream. Can we use that instead?

Ustream sucks I haven't tried Justin.tv.  Sure just post a link to your
justin.tv broadcast and we can watch you there.

But in the longer-term downloading an additional stream doesn't scale
once you've got about six feeds online.  So that was the idea with this
activity.

> > Code or a system that would function as a video version of IRC which
> > would help with following the activities during a hackathon.

So drawing inspiration from TV studio control rooms, CCTV systems and
digital television services.  Imagine each space having one or more
cameras feeding a relatively high quality feed to a central or
distributed control system.  The control system would preform
multiplexing and transcoding providing a single output showing all the
activity, but the user can also watch an individual or subset of the
feeds.  Throwing in some camera side and server side motion detection
should also help to limit bandwidth usage.

I think VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) will provide a number of useful
tools in building such a system.

Robert