911261 - Video Appliance: Brownbag Originator

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Air Mozilla Graveyard :: Krad Radio, defect, P2)

Description

[Richard A Milewski[:richard]]

On of the most common program formats on Air Mozilla is the "brownbag presentation". As currently implemented, this is a live speaker presenting a Keynote, Powerpoint or HTML slide deck.

The video stream of the speaker and that containing the slides is composited using either video window processing equipment in AirMozilla studio spaces, or using the "sharing" capability in Vidyo teleconferencing.  When done with proper window processers, the two images are also composited on top of a background image, and may contain border elements or additional channel content.

Now that KRAD Radio is approaching operational status we can implement a dedicated software/hardware appliance that will enable us to originate brownbag presentations from more venues both in Mozilla Spaces and in the larger Mozilla Community.

The advantage of a dedicated appliance is that we can automate many of the production-side operational tasks and enable anyone, event the presenter, to initiate and control the brownbag presentation stream.

A typical brownbag appliance would be a small bookshelf computer equipped with a video capture device, and an ethernet connection.  A custom-configured version of KRAD captures camera input from either a USB input or an HDMI video capture input, and the slide presentation from a video capture input, or a slide listener software component (described below).

A key feature of the brownbag appliance is a very simple user interface and a high level of operational automation. Transitions from Title slides to the composited program and from the program to an end slide are handled semi-automatically. The various stages of a brownbag are handled with a single mode change button:

Initially the button is a PREVIEW button.

Pushing the PREVIEW button, Shows a Prevew screen with the composited image, and a live VU meter of the speaker's microphone.  It also starts the content streams with the static Title Slide (a designated .png file) as the content on all streams.  The button then changes to a START button.

Pressing the START button starts the recording(s) of the content streams, waits 3 seconds and then cross-fades from the static title slide to the composited content.  The button then changes to an END button.

Pressing the END button cross-fades from the content to a static end-credits slide (again a simple .png file), waits three seconds and then stops the recordings (but not the streams.  The button then changes to a QUIT button, which when pressed terminates the streams.   Recordings are automatically archived and submitted to Vid.ly (or another transcoding service), and the appliance communicates the Vid.ly shortcode to Air Mozilla.


Slide listener - A software component that listens to a stream containing the slides.   The slide stream originates on the speaker's machine and is streamed using a custom configured KRAD instance optimized for the purpose.

Comment 1

[Andy Kochendorfer]

Platform decommissioned.

Comment 2

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Mozilla moved to another product.