Aims and Objectives

Submitted by and on Wed, 2006-05-24 23:53.

Those attending the meeting will have a key role in constructing the agenda - as the goal is to work on issues that concern us all. Given the space and budget available we have available Transmission will be limted to approximately 40 people.

The following are loose proposals for activities throughout the convergence:

  • Introductions and collective setting of final agenda for the meeting
  • Project Presentations – 30 minutes for each project to explain brief history, current status and planned future development
  • Forum/discussion on current technologies available for video distribution on the Internet, identification of pressing needs and collaborative possibilities
  • Wider discussion of social and philosophical aspects of the changing media landscape including the relationship between these new technologies and social movements - and how we can best promote the use of these tools for positive social change
  • Open collaborative spaces during the convergence to work on already identified areas of work
  • Workshops facilitated by developers and producers on specific skills related to online video distribution
  • Evening screenings/presentation of video work

Currently the aims of the gathering are to:

  • increase communication between projects
  • build relationships between projects working on different aspects of distribution
  • improve knowledge and skills of participants
  • assess and compare the current tools and projects in a constructive yet self-critical environment
  • investigate the possibilities of technical collaboration and consider a the possibilities of common platforms

Some possible outcomes might be:

  • sharing of resources (both software and hardware) including the possibility of building a server ring to share bandwidth or for p2p networking
  • the formation of an ongoing means of communication between projects to build collaborations and for technical support
  • a common syndication site bringing together RSS feeds produced by all participating projects and managed collectively
  • skill-sharing methods used in the various aspects of distribution (encoding, bittorrent, vodcasting, streaming etc.)
  • creating common documentation and instructional resources

server ring - shared bandwidth

Submitted by rama on Mon, 2006-06-05 15:07.

regarding "sharing of resources (both software and hardware) including the possibility of building a server ring to share bandwidth or for p2p networking"

we are already running for some time a servers ring where each server is somehow hooked to each other through icecast2 relays feature, thus sharing bandwidth for streaming across the ring member servers.

for this we use an unofficial branch of icecast2 (kh) which is the bleeding-edge unreleased icecast server.

at the moment I'm finishing the creation of icecast2 + libtheora + oggfwd + ffmpeg2theora debian packages, and will probably create a meta package called something like "streamkit" which will download all those packages at once.

I hope this can be useful for some of you as well.

More updates soon. cheers! rama