TheNotary
commented
8 years ago After shopping around I realized I couldn't put anything together on my budget. I'm job hunting at the moment and plan to put up some cash and start making some more serious project proposals to the space (if NB's streaming status is still as is). As that the tech job pickings are slim lately, I've kinda put this on the back burner and crossed my fingers that w/e Patrick came up with before the crypto talk would fix all-the-things.
That said, the cheapest 'high quality' solution requires at least an ebay acquisition of an $800 2video + 1 audio mixer. It seems it's still for sale. If you haven't already, see http://www.ebay.com/itm/Epiphan-Systems-Lecture-Recorder-x2-/182218218245?hash=item2a6d0d5b05:g:mqUAAOSwZVhWRKAa
Then there's the matter of buying a cam that outputs s-video... And then mounting the cam and pinning down the wires... Same for the mic. Would be really awesome to hack on this but I've got a budget issue blocking me.
For now playing around with streaming RSTP or w/e twitch is accepting is a good step forward, just to grow that experience at the space. I'm a webbish software engineer by trade and in the back of my mind, I've been thinking it would be possible to expose the LRx2 to the internet as something like https://class1.noisebridge.net/epiphan_api?stream_type=flv and then on any arbitrary web page/ app render that stream to the browser live using good old html5 <video> tags. I haven't directly researched this yet, but I think that's the gist of it.
Voice could be simply included in the LRx2 stream, but I think there's going to be a latency situation just because that seems how digitizing video signals always is. Obviously this may lead to the class feeling non-interactive. I expect that will be something you'll have to be addressed down the road, iteratively. One possible way to improve the situation would be to provide a mute button to the http a/v stream and instruct class participants to hop onto mumble to listen in real time (mumble is extremely low latency). The draw back is that sound will come in before the video come in. Could be jarring, could be workable. With this approach of disconnecting the audio/ video stream there's plenty of different setups that could be tried, I could ramble endlessly but a few examples would be:
- chat messages (students) -> 'chat noise' -> instructer reads chat and responds if it's a question
- chat messages (students) -> Teacher's Assistant -> reads chat to instructer for discussion over mumble
- voice chat (students) -> Instructor Response
Ping me anytime you need a remote debugger, I'm obviously interested in facilitating streams coming out of NB :)
lxpk
I'm going to start streaming my classes in Twitch and/or other services we could use. I'd like to help set up a streaming system as described.