aKademy Streaming Live OGGs

The aKademy Team is excited to announce a set of live audio and
video streams covering the
KDE Community World Summit 2004
, code-named "aKademy", taking
place in Ludwigsburg, Germany from August 21st to 29th. Those who
cannot attend in person can now watch or listen to what is going on
over the Internet, thanks to Fluendo,
a GStreamer-based streaming media company. Read on for full details.

Tom Chance, KDE Press Officer commented that "these streams show that free software
can now let people from around the world watch a large community event,
bringing a conference for hundreds of people over the Internet".

Anyone with an Internet connection and a stream-capable video player like HelixPlayer 1.0 can use the
streams. The video stream, thanks to bandwidth from the hosts the Filmakademie, can
handle 100 users, and broadcasts as an OGG stream encoded with Theora/Vorbis, whilst the audio stream can handle 200 users and broadcasts as an OGG Vorbis stream. Archives of talks
will be put online shortly after they finish, for those who miss
the live streams. Details for the streams can be found on the aKademy web site at:
http://streamingserver.akademy.kde.org.

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Comments

by yardbird (not verified)

Watching now with kaffeine :)

Can hear some voices in the background and some guys passing in front of the camera. Very nice.

by Carlo (not verified)

Hm, this detains me from buying some food for the weekend. ;)

by Rajil Saraswat (not verified)

Mplayer is not able to show video for the archived file http://ktown.kde.org/akademy/Gustavo_Boiko_Common_Code_Patterns_video.ogg

mplayer Gustavo_Boiko_Common_Code_Patterns_video.ogg
Playing Gustavo_Boiko_Common_Code_Patterns_video.ogg.
Ogg stream 0 is of an unknown type
Ogg file format detected.
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [libvorbis] Ogg/Vorbis audio decoder
AUDIO: 24000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 4000->96000 (32.0 kbit)
Selected audio codec: [vorbis] afm:libvorbis (OggVorbis Audio Decoder)
==========================================================================
Checking audio filter chain for 24000Hz/2ch/16bit -> 24000Hz/2ch/16bit...
AF_pre: af format: 2 bps, 2 ch, 24000 hz, little endian signed int
AF_pre: 24000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian)
AO: [oss] 24000Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps)
Building audio filter chain for 24000Hz/2ch/16bit -> 24000Hz/2ch/16bit...
Video: no video
Starting playback...
Ogg : bad packet in stream 1
Ogg : bad packet in stream 0

by Johan Dahlin (not verified)

You need to install libtheora and recompile MPlayer with theora support.

by Senatore (not verified)

I have libtheora 1.0 alpha2 and mplayer 1.0 pre5 and I have compiled it with theora support but I still get this error and can't play the video. What else could be wrong?

by _ (not verified)

you need libtheora alpha3

by Thomas J Powderly (not verified)

I use Ubuntu Dapper and have libtheora ver 0.0.0.alpha4-1.1
I get the 'Ogg stream 0 is of unknown type' error after it plays.
So I guess my mplayer (from a live cd used for install )
wasnt compiled for libtheora support.
I can see that 'ogg' and 'vorbis' and 'theora' are not in any list on any tab in Preferences, but where should it appear when I get source and compile it? )

by Xunil (not verified)

It's Ogg, not OGG!

by My my (not verified)

I'm watching the stream right now. After downloading HelixPlayer, I paste the stream URL to the open location of HelixPlayer, and instantly the video stream shows up. I'm amazed! This is the first time I've experienced a free, patent-free, license-free video streaming format. All others that I've used in the past have some catches to them like Windows Media, Real Video, Divx, Divx :), other mutations of Divx, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, and MPEG 4.

Finally a free, usable, fast streaming video format.

My question is:

How can I record from my video camera to Theora file format?
I have MPEG 2 movie I want to convert to Theora file format, how can I do it?
How can I stream Theora file format?

Thanks!

I can seek too :) ... oh damn! this is good stuff. No more lock in with Microsoft Video Streaming, kakaka! w00t w00t!

Thanks guys!

To record to stream, you can use mplayer and it's -dumpstream and -dumpfile options. You can find more in the mplayer docs, or maybe someone will post something more helpful (I'm a bit busy with press releases ;)

"How can I record from my video camera to Theora file format?
I have MPEG 2 movie I want to convert to Theora file format, how can I do it?
How can I stream Theora file format?"

This is all doable of course, but at the moment doing this is more of a developer only thing. The theora encoder hasn't been integrated into the user-type applications yet (ffmpeg, mencoder etc.), and the streaming code hasn't been released by fluendo yet (it's not ready).

And of course, technically, theora is still alpha.

"This is the first time I've experienced a free, patent-free, license-free video streaming format."
That is not exactly true. Theora is NOT patent-free.
On2 have several patents on the theora/VP3 codec. However, xiph have signed an agreement with On2 where On2 agrees on allowing free use of their patented technology. This agreement is irrevocable. (At least, that's what the xiph website says).

by anon (not verified)
by Anonymous (not verified)

Track 2 is also recorded but is not streamed. It will be available for later download (actually it's already but the current download location may change).

by Moritz Moeller-... (not verified)

Schade, aber nach 2 min kriege ich Kopfschmerzen von der extrem wirren Kameraführung. Zudem probiert jemand noch verschiedene Fokussierungen, Bildverzerrungen und Farben aus.
Akadamy? Eher Kindergarten scheint mir. Schade um die eigentlich gute Serviceleistung.

Lasst die Kamera einfach STEHEN. Danke.

Use the audio stream and slides when available. Am I glad that the nice Fluendo guys will likely not understand your flame.

Until the last two speeches or so the camera was basically static. After that the one then behind the camera apparently thought it would be a good idea to catch the people asking questions in the QA part with the cam as well. I can't fault him for that. ;)

by Braden MacDonald (not verified)

The server seems overloaded at the moment - I can't connect :-(

by Liucougar (not verified)

So sad...

200 users capability is not sufficient for such a large KDE community.

Thanks anyway to the guys behind all these

by Andy (not verified)

Maybe someone could get these streams onto peercast?
http://www.peercast.org

I don't have enough upstream myself. By getting this on peercast, you could have virtually unlimited viewers

by Scott Wheeler (not verified)

All of the talks should also be available recorded later as well.

by Mikhail Capone (not verified)

It should all (audio and video) be hosted on Archive.org -- it's exactly the kind of thing that they do.

by Johan Dahlin (not verified)

The maximum number of clients connected were 75 (video) 15 (audio), so I'm quite sure 200 audio clients will be enough. Maybe we will need to increase the limit for video clients, but I doubt it.

Unfortunately it's a little bit difficult to get a theora capable video player installed at this point. But I expect it to be better as soon as the first stable release of theora is released and distributions can start shipping applications using it.

by Andy (not verified)

Just take the finished oggs and feeding them into a muli should solve all bandwidth problems *hint*... ;-)

by veton (not verified)

The sound is coming one or two second later.
Also we hear to much the noice in the audience and that makes it hard to understand the speaker. Does anyone know how to filter this (from kaffeine)?

Nevertheless nice open source work work.

by - (not verified)

Try the KPlayer/MPlayer combo, it should give better AV sync in most cases.

http://kplayer.sourceforge.net/

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

by jean-baptiste (not verified)

Really nice.
This convinced me to switch the video archives on my website to theora/vorbis.

One small remark for the archives:
The ogg files are sent as plain text, and so cannot be opened from konqueror.
Just adding a .htaccess file to the archives directory containing:
AddType application/ogg ogg
will solve the issue (at least it worked for my site)

by Tom Huckstep (not verified)

I don't have enough bandwidth to download the audio files. Are there transcriptions of these talks?

Tom

by Anonymous (not verified)

The streaming server is gone, the record archive is currently available at http://ktown.kde.org/akademy/