LibrePlanet:Conference/2024/Streaming

This page is a WIP (Work in progress).

Our conference this year had three tracks (Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune). Jupiter and Saturn were held at WIT (Wentworth Institute of Technology) and Neptune was completely remote. Since they were so different, we will talk about them separately.

Jupiter and Saturn

Jupiter was streamed from Watson Hall at WIT. Saturn was streamed from Beatty 426 at WIT. The projectors were the property of WIT and we connected to them through VGA from the presenter laptop. The audio equipment was primarily owned by WIT and we received either an XLR line in to a sound board or a USB. The camera in Saturn was also WIT owned as it was built into the classroom and we received the feed through USB. The laptops, desktops, and table top sound board was run by FSF staff. The laptops and desktops all ran the Trisquel operating system and were free software down to the BIOS.

Neptune

We usually stream three tracks, but we did Neptune differently this year. Instead of watching a stream of a video conference, we allowed all participants to join the video conference. For video conferencing software, we switched to using a new platform to us called Galène. In previous years, we have used Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button. We had heard from our friends that Galène used less resources and had a pleasant user experience so we decided to give it a good test with LibrePlanet. If you attended the LibrePlanet 2024 Neptune stream and have feedback, let us know by emailing sysadmin@fsf.org with comments.

We used the master branch at the time (commit e68ff8628749c1767f9744ce6a208da6a068a85a) as well as a LibreJS patch and some additional patches for logging usernames, identify, and chat.

Processing video

Video saved from a stream does not include timestamps so we start with a simple remux that only takes a few seconds.

ffmpeg -i INPUT_FILE -acodec copy -vcodec copy OUPUT.webm

for i in $(find . -type f -name "*webm"); do ls "$i" && ffmpeg -i $i -vcodec copy -acodec copy remux/$i ; done

For footage saved from Galène, we additionally passed it through this before editing.

ffmpeg -i input_video.webm -r 29.97 output.webm

Simple cuts can be cut with the start and end timestamps. Output must be checked at least at the beginning and the end that additional time does not need to be added on either end.

ffmpeg -ss 00:48:32 -to 01:14:12 -i input.webm -c copy output.webm

BlenderDumbass helped us out with a new intro clip for footage this year. Asgard added a nice piano soundtrack to the intro.

For more complex edits, we use kdenlive.