Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Streaming video and moving sites

This week we will be handling the video and audio streaming for the same conference we did last year. Last year we had 70,000 listeners and 20,000 viewers approx over 4-5 days. I don't know if this year will be bigger or smaller, we shall wait and see.

Last year I went to the country in which the conference is being held but this year I am not, so I have been setting up the links on the server ready for the feed and my son helped set up the 'shuttle' system to send to the conference. The 'shuttle' is a very small but powerful computer with a special card inside for converting video into the web stream. It's about the size of a large shoebox, but really a pretty powerful computer.

Anyway it took a while to configure, but not only is it working better than last year in the tests, but I learnt quite a bit more about video streaming in the process. It's a never ending cycle of learning and developing here. So the rest of the week I shall be [on and off] monitoring the feed and checking everything is working correctly.

I also moved one of the main sites we handle here from the second London server to our new server cluster in Frankfurt. There are still about 20 sites we have to move sometime soon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Richard,
A friend stumbled accross your blog and sent it to me. we just returned from Cyprus where I recieved a job offer as the principal of the American Academy in Nicosia. Had some questions or concerns. The price of housing (we would like to rent a house with a yard, willing to commute if necessary). Any comments on what we can expect to pay for decent place. Also, we want a good church youth group for our daughters aged 11 and 13. Know of any? We understand there are some good churches in Larnaka? How are you liking it there?
Steve

steve.wilkins@sbcglobal.net