DConf Videos, Why?

[Mike Parker]

On Thursday, 30 May 2019 at 19:09:19 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>
> So what happened to the streaming?  Was that only setup for the 
> on-location camera?  Is that why we didn't get streaming 
> working for the first few talks?  And I assume the second 
> camera is the one used for the final videos that will be 
> posted? (Not that it would've made a difference for me, as I 
> was coincidentally busy those few days and couldn't have 
> watched the streams anyway.)

Streaming *was working*. Some remote viewers had issues with 
WebEx that the venue A/V team was unable to troubleshoot because 
they couldn't reproduce them. They were monitoring the live 
stream through WebEx on a MacBook in their control room. I pulled 
it up on my Linux Mint notebook just fine. So we asked them to 
move to YouTube.

They were going to switch to YouTube after lunch on Day 1, but 
there was an issue in that it kept horizontally flipping the 
video. They were unable to resolve it before the talks resumed, 
so they continued with WebEx. Sinisa Poznanovic, the venue's A/V 
tech working with us, worked on it that evening after we all left 
and was able to resolve it so we could live stream on YouTube 
from day two.


>
> Also, IME, A/V (in general, not just for DConf) has a tendency 
> to go horribly wrong unless actually tested on-site beforehand.
>  There's always something unexpected that goes wrong, or 
> otherwise doesn't work well.  Assumptions are made that turn 
> out to be false, etc., etc.. I find that the only way to be 
> really sure is to actually test everything beforehand, e.g., if 
> the A/V crew was onsite an hour beforehand and tested the full 
> loop -- recording, audio volume, streaming, whatever else that 
> will be used.

The issue we had with WebEx could not have been caught on site. 
Like I said, they had the stream running on a MacBook to monitor 
it and it was working as expected.

I don't recall when the team from last year discovered the 
YouTube stream wasn't recording, or if they could have caught it 
before we started. But that issue is precisely why we had a 
separate team doing the recording this year.