I am thankful you’ve showed up with a lot of positive energy. Good that you have everything required - but you can always ask for help when you need. One good thing is that we still have time !
That will be very cool. We meet every Sunday at 9 PM (meeting link at the top of the thread). That will be a good time to sync up with others!
@Muneer_S mentioned during the meeting that we should at least be monitoring the live chat. We streamed to YouTube last year.
I am not averse to ideas, and you certainly have some interesting ones. We’ll probably have to decide after discussing within ourselves (including you) related to effort and gains of doing these. Best done in those 9 PM meetings!
No intention to discourage you here but think of roll out also… first It’s not clear how many people actually looked at the livestream last year (counts were not high). In times of breaks, people watching may also need a break. People may also be switching across livestreams - just like how they switch across auditoriums to catch their favourite talks. You also have to consider that all these are more work 
Finally, we have to consider logistics – we may be having a different set of volunteers managing the livestream on both days - so anything that we can’t easily transfer in terms of activities across volunteers will not be easy to pull off satisfactorily on ground. Think 4 volunteers per day(1 per livestream) x 2 = 8. Ideally they should do something simple. Actually the idea of tracking the viewer (for me) came out of thinking that it’s possible that volunteers may be looking at their mobile and may otherwise be distracted at times. Professionals may have ways to handle such things as they are accountable to customers (audi 1 and audi 2 will have professional camera folks), but for volunteers we must look to make their life easier when we can.
The beauty of this camera control - if we can pull it off reliably - is that will reduce grunt work. Audi 3 (devroom 1) is where we will certainly try this. Devroom 2 is too small - but it could use this as well IDK. And the others (Audi 1/2) are managed by the vendor camera crew - where we do only the livestreaming.
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More updates from the meeting (Aug 10 2025, 9 PM)
- We also discussed about having one of the volunteers at respective devroom to monitor the live chat
- Using foss united’s server for the streaming from the cloud so that viewer’s experience is seemless
- Post the link of new post in this thread on telegram so the volunteers can be in sync (As theres no notification from the forum)
- Audi 1/2 we have to let the camera guys do their thing partially
- Audi 3 is fully under our control
- Will be doing more research on the overall workflow this week and explore how other conferences handle this
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Volunteer call on August 17, 9 PM. Attendees : @Mohd_Yasir_K_N and @Shree_Kumar . @Muneer_S had exams next day, so had to bail out.
We had a quick round of updates: Shree had visited one camera rental vendor - VCams - a decent sized rental ops packed with gear. Checkout out the Sony X6 videocam. Turned out to be much smaller than expected. Yasir has been looking at voctomix and facing some trouble (doesn’t work in wayland?). We’re probably OK using OBS.
This week will be exam time for Yasir, so expecting not much to move. Shree was busy the past few weeks, and will be finally getting some time to look at the video stuff seriously.
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Volunteer call on Sep 8, 9 PM. Attendees: @Muneer_S @Mohd_Yasir_K_N @Shree_Kumar
Thanks @Muneer_S for notes and posting them on telegram.
Here are the meeting minutes:
- We ran through our agenda which was already put up on the telegram group.
- Our roles: Yasir, Muneer and me will help with initial setup and hand-holding in each room for some time. For the rest of the time, the volunteers assigned to each room will run the show. Yasir and Muneer will periodically go and check the devrooms for satisfactory functioning and to address any queries.
- 8 volunteers (potentially students) are required for running the livestream show in Audi 1 and Audi 2. 2 of them will be handling an entire day. So 4 for both audis for a day, 8 for both days. These volunteers can attend the rest of the conference on the other day (i.e. where they don’t have assigned duties). We need 2 for each audi to make sure someone or the other is always present. Shree will separately discuss this with @ansh to get volunteers.
- We don’t need additional volunteers for devrooms. Devrooms have provision for 2 logistics volunteers. These folks will be in charge of the livestream setup. They may need to do things like moving the camera to follow the speaker.
- Unfortunately, given the number of volunteers we have to manage, we are ruling out using the Cube (offered by Kiran of HasGeek). We feel it’s better if all setups look very similar. We are getting 4 laptops for doing the livestream. Each laptop will be combined with 2 capture cards. Laptop based system is also better protected against power failures (in the rare chance these happen). The laptop probably also gives us better performance to handle multiple streams, but we aren’t sure yet. We are yet to get the laptops. We will get at-least 1 a week in advance, so this will help us prepare for any surprises.
- We will buy 8 more PiBox capture cards (2 as spares). 2 of them are already purchased and approved by Shree to have good results. These cards have an LED which turns on when the capture is in progress, which is a nice touch.
- Only the small devroom will use the FOSDEM audio card to mix audio from the speaker mic and hand mic. We need to rent these two things.
- For devroom 1 and 2, we will rent the following hardware : 2x FX3 cameras (these come with 2 storage cards), 2 lenses, 2 tripods. One of these sets will be rented for 3 days, the other set will be rented for 2 days. The extra day renting (Sep 19th) is for us to do initial setup and get comfortable with the equipment. Shree will go ahead and make arrangements for renting the equipment.
- We also need some additional storage for dumping all the video files from the cameras. @Arya_Kiran any pointers on how big these files were last time ? Did you back them up on laptops ?
- @Jeswin will need to modify the livestreaming templates a bit. The template has space for only one speaker name, but some talks have two. I also noticed that the template has a much smaller box for the speaker video, compared to last time. Templates will also need to be transparent in the area of the slides and the speaker video.
- Muneer showed us how OBS allows easy switch across templates.
- Livestreaming will be done only to FOSSU YouTube channel. 8 scheduled livestreams will be setup in advance - 4 each for each room for both days of the conference.
- Livestreaming volunteers will also be required to moderate the chat. Questions may be taken online and presented to the speakers at the end of their talk at the Q&A part.
Apart from that, here are the action items - activities that each of us will be doing this week:
- @Muneer_S and @Mohd_Yasir_K_N will test YouTube and prepare the livestream templates. Specifically, they will also check what happens if the livestream is stopped (say by network disconnection, power failure or any other way). I have read that if it’s a “scheduled livestream”, then the livestream continues and resumes when network connection is reestablished - but what it shows to the end users at the time of disruption is not known. Muneer and Yasir will clarify this when testing. Shree can be pulled in as an audience if required.
- @Shree_Kumar will create OBS plugins to handle cable disconnects for the capture cards. Separate plugins are required for handling both video and audio streams. These can be tied to the serial number of the capture cards, so that plugging and unplugging to different ports or assignment of /dev/videoN nodes makes no difference during usage.
Open item to discuss: what does the livestream chat moderation imply for the audi 1 and audi 2 volunteers - in terms of our expectations ? We should discuss and give them clear guidelines.
One thing we missed discussing: is there a way in which we can arrange broadcast local livestreams ? I’ve read on and off about local UDP multicast, but not sure how this works, or its potential impact on the shared network. @Muneer_S briefly touched upon nginix that was used by folks at FOSS.NITC, but we didn’t discuss these aspects deeply.
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