[Discuss] BLU meeting live-stream experiment

[John Abreau]

The delay shouldn't be a problem, as long as it's fairly short. It just
caught me by surprise, and I wanted to get a sense of how large it was.

On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 10:42 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:

> John Abreau wrote:
> > The only real question was whether the live-stream would replace the
> > old camera, or merely augment it. Based on the results we got this
> > month, it looks like it will be best to use both. The webcam does a
> > great job of live-streaming the meeting, but the old camera produces
> > a much higher quality video.
>
> There are a lot of inexpensive ($100 to $200) point-and-shoot cameras on
> he market that claim to do 1080p video. (Some sub-$100 cameras can be
> found on Amazon.) Not only should such a camera offer better quality
> than a typical web cam, but you also typically get a zoom lens so you
> can more easily frame what you want to record.
>
> Many YouTubers use cameras like this, and later graduate to DSLRs. I was
> curious to see if there were any that could not only record the video
> but stream it as well over USB. There are cameras that can, but
> apparently they are quite rare, and it is hard to identify them based on
> specifications.
>
> Even third party reviews aren't of much help, as they usually don't
> address the live streaming need. You can find lots of reviews for
> cameras useful for recording YouTube videos, but they all assume a
> record-and-upload process.
>
> (The reviews, however, do point out that most of the low cost
> point-and-shoot cameras fall short when it comes to capturing audio, and
> a mic jack is unlikely to exist until you move up to a DSLR. But as long
> as the live video doesn't have much latency, you can just feed audio
> separately into Hangouts.)
>
> Despite the difficulties of finding the right camera that supports this
> functionality, I still think this is probably a better than a web cam.
>
>
> Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > As for sound, there are microphones at the podium we can use.
>
> If you have the budget, a wireless lapel mic would probably be best for
> the speaker.
>
> Some of the MIT rooms have ceiling mics to pick up the audience, which
> could be used for the Q&A portion, but might be simpler to just use an
> omni or 180 degree pattern USB mic for that, like
> https://youtu.be/fANP9Q6OKmQ
>
> For Boston.pm we often deal with remote speakers, so micing the speaker
> isn't our responsibility, but micing the room is, and for that using the
> laptop's built-in mic isn't ideal, so we're considering an external mic.
>
>
> John Abreau wrote:
> > I could use help figuring out the delay. At one point early in
> > Brian's talk, I stepped aside and pulled up the youtube feed on my
> > tablet to verify that everything was working, and the live stream was
> > delayed significantly from what Brian was saying at the time.
>
> In my experience this is typical.
>
> When using Hangouts, there are two ways of accessing the stream: 1. As a
> contributing participant in the Hangout. For these users the delay is
> kept to a minimum. (If you were having a video call with someone, a long
> delay would make the product unusable.) 2. As a view-only observer
> through YouTube or the Hangouts UI. For these users you'll see a delay.
>
> My guess is that for users in group #2, regardless of which UI they are
> using, Google is passing the stream from the Hangouts servers to the
> YouTube servers in order to allow you to scale up to hundreds or
> thousands of viewers, and propagation delay is added in the process.
>
> Also keep in mind that YouTube lets you pause the live stream. When you
> unpause it resumes from where you left off. (I'm not sure if that is
> limited to a maximum window, beyond which it jumps forward in the
> stream.) But this is another way in which you can end up with a
> significant delay between what you see and what is live.
>
> In any case, do you see the delay as problematic? A 30 second delay
> should be tolerable, even during a Q&A session, if the questions are
> submitted by IRC or the Q&A sidebar in Hangouts.
>
>  -Tom
>
> --
> Tom Metro
> The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
> "Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
> http://www.theperlshop.com/
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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