Taking the next steps: let's talk about video implementation for Airtime
The last Airtime Google Hangout brought together the Airtime team and community to discuss possibilities of video implementation in Airtime.
With us were Romain from Liquidsoap and Isabel from Irrepressible Voices to present what they are doing at the moment with their projects, and how their experience can help us with further developing Airtime.
The next steps
For video implementation in Airtime, it would be essential to change the library, as currently it is all set up for audio. Besides, to preview video files, an in-browser video player would be needed. Another issue is what codecs to use for encoding and which resolution would be necessary or the limit. We also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of both pre-encoding and live encoding. Pre-encoding would not allow for so much flexibility in scheduling, but might use fewer CPU resources.
The next steps for Airtime and video implementation are to enable uploading video in a limited number of formats, requiring changes to the library. Next up would be to support a video output stream for watching within the browser, and then a video player applet to play HTML5 video streams. Our existing output programs Liquidsoap, Icecast and jPlayer all support video to some extent.
Isabel also looks forward to the possibility of adding more and richer metadata to the videos in the Airtime interface, to be able to quickly work with all content tagged with a certain category. We might need to develop a new upload interface which prompted users to enter essential metadata at the time of contribution.
Do you want to contribute to Airtime development? Come and join our forums or write us an email and show us what you've got!
Next Hangout: Recording live content in Airtime
Our next Airtime hangout will be on Thursday, 22 August, 5 pm CET (11 am EST) with a focus on everything around (live)recording inside/outside Airtime. We would like to hear how about your setup - what is working great, what are the issues? And of course: what can we make better?
Come and join us in the hangout and demo / contribute / ask / support! We will post the link to the hangout in the forum and on Twitter soon.