Setting up the streaming

To provide the streaming service and to make and edit the videos, we used various free software tools. You can find them in this page, as well as some useful scripts we used. If you want to know what software we are using to run our server, please refer to this page.

Videos: recording, editing and encoding.

To record the videos we shot with our DV camera, we used a combination of dvgrab and mplayer.

dvgrab -format raw - | mplayer -cache 1024 -dumpstream -

To edit the audio files we used Audacity, encoding the audio in Theora Ogg format.

For the watermarks we layered on the videos we used GIMP, and Kdenlive.

To encode the videos in ogv format, we used libtheora from Xiph.org

Streaming:

Our streaming server: http://streaming.hipatia.net:8000/ is running Icecast2.

To send the videos from our DV camera to our server for the live streaming, we used dvgrab with ffmpeg and oggfwd. To embed the video in our website pages we use the player provided by iTheora, using the specifications of HTML5.

Here is the script we are using to send the videos to our Icecast server:

dvgrab -format raw - | ffmpeg2theora -a 0 -v 5 -f dv -x 640 -y 480 -o /dev/stdout - | oggfwd <icecast_server> <port> <password> guri.ogv

We support the FSF campaign PlayOgg! to spread information about this free format. For this reason all our videos are encoded in ogg or ogv format. To see how to configure our Apache based server to manage ogg files, please see this page.