Technical difficulties re:streaming/recording

Community Akademy
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Now that Akademy is well and truly over, hopefully everyone has had something of a chance to rest!

Seems we had some technical difficulties when it comes to the online participation and recording. I wasn’t there in person to assist with the issues unfortunately, but I think we should have a post-mortem on the problems to identify the issues and hopefully ensure we do better next time. These are a few things I noticed:

Video

The visual quality was so low that the image was mostly smudged pixels. I am not sure how this is even possible in this day, since even the cheapest cameras for many years now have been able to easily do full HD at minimum.

Audio

There were issues with the audio quality being difficult to understand people speaking, microphones having feedback and making terrible noises, and sometimes not seeming to work at all.

The YouTube auto-captions feature is famous for being frequently error prone, though it was even more so here because of the low audio quality, which proves a large accessibility barrier.

BoFs

Something hardware related prevented the online participation of BoFs entirely, though it wasn’t said what. It was mentioned (I forget where!) that further event recordings would be posted shortly to YouTube, I am not sure if they are having difficulty as well since they aren’t up yet. It would be great, because I for one am feeling increasingly out of the loop based on the things people have been mentioning from the extra content beyond the main 2 days that were live streamed.

This leaves some questions, such as:

  • What was the nature of the various hardware shortcomings and failures?
  • Were there software-based issues?
  • Is assistance required for things like video editing, adding timestamps, etc?
  • Do we need to purchase audio/visual hardware to improve support for online participation and recordings?
  • What can we do to ensure a smoother experience in the future, both for those consuming the online media and those making presentations? (eg delays and awkwardness due to microphone feedback issues and etc)

Having these things work smoothly, reliably, and with good quality/accessibility seems important for allowing those who weren’t able to travel to keep in the loop. In addition Akademy is a fairly public window into the KDE world, and it would be nice to present that well.

I hope that some folks can chime in with details of the situations, and that we can come up with plans to ensure a better experience next time! :tada: It looks like people had a great time, and a lot was covered.

3 Likes
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Pardon my ignorance, what does “BoFs” mean?

I even searched for the definition with no avail. All the results I could found seemed off (for example, on Urban Dictionary and on Wikitionary).

I also searched for just “BoF”, as I assumed the ending “s” is to denote plurality, but the results also seemed not make any sense.

Not a native speaker, so I apologize if it is something very straightforward.

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It definitely isn’t a usual term. It is defined on the Akademy site like this:

Akademy features a 2-day conference with presentations on the latest KDE developments, followed by 4 days of workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) and coding sessions.

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Thanks a lot =)

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After your lead, I found this explanation in the DrupalCon 2019 site:

Birds of a Feather sessions (or BoFs) are informal gatherings of like-minded individuals who wish to discuss a certain topic without a pre-planned agenda. For example, BoFs allow groups to meet and discuss issues relating to regular conference sessions and talk out common problems facing the community.

reference:

https://events.drupal.org/amsterdam2019/bof-sessions.html

Thanks again

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I agree with that we should solve such problems in advance.
I remember I tried to see some videos that was interesting to me from previous years, and the video quality and most importantly, audio quality (!) was such low, that such videos were complete rubbish.
I hoped this year this will be ok, but… :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

I could help with video editing, cutting silence, synchronizing audio and video, overlaying slides, categorizing and so on. But, the source materials should be of good quality.

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More video availability was announced on the Akademy mailing list thanks to @Kenny_Duffus. :blue_heart:

They appear to be videos of individual talks, and the quality seems better than the livestreams were. They also have subtitles. :tada:

They are available on PeerTube and as direct file downloads.

The mail also said more should be added in the next few days.

Unfortunately does not include slides associated with the talks, and there are several instances where the presenter is heavily referencing slides that aren’t in view of the camera.

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You can find the slides that the speakers have uploaded on

Click on the :paperclip: icon for the talk

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that is all the videos we have, uploaded now

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That’s great, thanks Kenny!

The link for the slides doesn’t seem to include ones from most of the trainings & BoFs. For example I am trying to watch the one on Union, where Arjen is heavily referencing slides - are those coming as well?

Also occurs to me it might be good to add a link to the slides to the description for the videos / beside the file downloads so they are together when being referenced.

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if someone could take the time to create a list of the slide urls in the same order as the playlist here that would be a big help in getting talk slide links added

Most BoFs wouldn’t have had slides