771964 - Air Mozilla should change the world

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Air Mozilla :: Other, enhancement)

Description

[David Richards]

Imagine if creating a professional quality live broadcasting TV or radio station was as easy as starting up a blog. The hardest part about starting a blog is choosing a theme and writing something worth reading. Technical people reading this will instantly recognize the complexities and resource requirements of live audio mixing and video compositing are exponentially higher than that of transmitting stylized blocks of prose. Now is the time to conquer this challenge. Websites such as ustream, turntable.fm and countless others have shown to be extremely popular, the people of the internet crave individual and community managed live content. Mainstream cable news channels are jarringly out of touch with people who have thoughts, and should be discarded as obsolete relics of a by-gone era. FM Radio is a squandering of the electromagnetic spectrum. At the present moment if you want to set up your own radio or TV station on the internet, your choices are between proprietary 3rd party controlled toys such as those mentioned above, a fiddly confusing concoction of existing open source software, or endless 1000's of dollars worth of proprietary software and black boxes. This situation is not-acceptable. Open software using open codecs running on commodity hardware is the remedy. The revolution will be televised, by you!

If this a pipe dream, then I will re-light, and tell you a tale about a series of tubes that is changing our world every second of every day, but perhaps you are also seeing what I am seeing.

I have been thinking and working on this matter most hours of most days for nearly two years now, and progressed quite far in development. Significant amounts of working code is already quite useful. I would love to work with like minded mozillians to take this to the finish line and beyond!

Comment 1

[David Richards]

If its technical details you want, and I imagine it is, I will provide them, please ask me anything. I have taken a few stabs at describing parts of the system, but I always have to balance writing words with writing codes, and to this time I have been heavily biased to code, but I would like to get all of my ideas out here and my vision for how this will evolve going forward.

To start, the project at this time is called Krad Radio, and it works as a daemon on linux systems. When the daemon is started, it does nothing. Everything is controlled via clients, which can be command line, GUI, Websockets or anything you can think of. Clients use a client library to talk to the daemon, and are automatically synchronized. They can be written in any language, though currently the main targets are C, Ruby and Python. The daemon is written in C. I have command line, web and GTK based clients currently. The web client speaks JSON over Websockets. Physical hardware control is possible using OSC devices and software, and also MIDI. This architecture is inspired by the architecture of XMMS2. 

The code is living here: https://github.com/krad-radio/krad_radio/tree/oneman

Some blogging has happened here: http://kradradio.com/

Some video demos can be found here: 

http://media.kradradio.com/?dir=/KradRadio/airmoz
http://media.kradradio.com/?dir=/KradRadio
http://media.kradradio.com/?dir=/KradRadio/screencasts
http://media.kradradio.com/?dir=/KradRadio/GeckoBot

Comment 2

[David Richards]

Krad Radio + Air Mozilla status update

Yesterday I did not have all my ducks in a row in order to broadcast the monday morning session, this will be the last time that happens. 

I would like to by next monday mornings session at the latest do a produced broadcast that is available for for folks to tune into as an option to the existing streams, we did something like this a few weeks ago, had about 10~ people using it and it seemed to work quite well, this was just by posting the stream link in IRC.

What I mean more specially by produced broadcast, is that before/after to the event, videos/graphics/information will be displayed. During the event perhaps a station logo will appear briefly, or a dinosaur might run across the screen. This would still be simply rebroadcasting the output from the existing infrastructure. The control of the broadcast should be entirely browser based.

Comment 3

[Richard A Milewski[:richard]]

David,

Let me know the url for this and I'll post it on the Air Mozilla page for the Monday Meeting.

Comment 4

[Richard A Milewski[:richard]]

Projext abandoned