[gst-devel] windows based live editing software

[Edward Hervey]

Hi,

  I'm forwarding your mail to the gstreamer-devel mailing-list so that
other people interested can also give their feedback. Comments of mine
are below.

On Sat, 2007-11-17 at 16:58 +0100, Juergen Thiel wrote:
> Hi Edward,
> 
> thanks for your quick answer. Sorry for not putting direct questions in my
> e-mail. What I wanted to know was if GStreaner can do all that - and you
> addressed all the points. I had the idea that you could help me because I
> found a GStreamer-link and realized, that you and your team has the
> knowledge of all that technical details for my TV station project.
> 
>  According to your mail GStreamer can do most of the things I would like to
> do. It can handle even these long stream addresses and all thinkable
> formats. But you only see things without audio, so I can't control audio
> levels.
> 
> Yesterday I found vjdirector 1.3 on the net which is almost like DVmixer but
> it can handle stream. Still it crashes as well maybe due to buffering of the
> streams.
> 
> The thing I forgot to mention: Because I'm not able to afford satellite link
> up or a microwave truck, I plan to feed the reports from the correspondents
> via MSN or other applications which allow you to quickly get multi-media
> files across. The live reports should be also provided via streaming video.
> I only suppose, if it has to be pre-renderer or bufferd, there will always
> be a lot of dead air before the correspondent reponds to the anchors in the
> studio.
> 
> I visited several dozens of TV stations over the years, and most of them of
> course use expensive hardware - at the moment not possible to afford for a
> student without much money. To make it possible at all I thought it would be
> possible to run this thing from a normal computer. That wouldn't be any
> problem if I only would wanna broadcast recorded content.
> 
> Because I 'd like to do at least one newscast in the beginning and expand on
> that after money and manpower comes in. Anytime a story breaks I would like
> to interrupt the program and take the live coverage of all those local
> stations. But living in Germany non of that is available via normal
> satellite or cabe channels. The only way to get it is via internet-streams.
> That would give me an advantage to all those other german channels who are
> not very quick to react. If they are quick they take CNN Europe or Sky News
> which in return has to take their footage from CNN USA and Fox News. These
> steps in between let German media always look one step behind.
> 
> Let me set the scene - local television here in Leipzig
> 
> Local coverage on the other hand is very limited. Most stations - especially
> in East germany only have one daily "newscast" which is nothing compared
> with English speaking countries. It is a mixture of "paid for-" or PR
> reports and service content, limiting the actual news to 1ß minutes. All
> looks very amateurish. And the 30 sec weather forecast is the biggest joke
> on earth. Any English speaking television viewer would shake his head or die
> laughing. In the field of graphics and titles they learned a bit during the
> last years so at least that doesn't look as home-made as it used to look.
> But still they have neither time and temperature, nor crawl titles or even
> animated backgrounds. The live content is limited to half an hour to one
> hour a day plus two hours pre-recorded. The rest of our local channel
> Leipzig Fernsehen's content is filled with re-runs of these daily 3 hours
> plus paid-for call in game shows where stupid people spend 2 Euros a minute
> tryin to call but nobody is let through. If there is no 9live during the
> night they show soft-porn and telephone sex commercials.
> 
> You see - if I quickly could build an audience online and than apply for a
> license, this thing wouldn't be the biggest competition on earth.
> 
> The state sponsored public broadcaster MDR of course has a wider coverage
> area and a bigger budget and that really shows. OK, ther is no morning news,
> now news later than 10PM, no breaking news and stuff. But being a full
> service TV station it is no news channel anyway. But as it is for national
> TV, MDR is very slow to react - even to stories happening in the prime
> broadcast area. MDR serves the German states of Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and
> thueringen and is available nationally and also across Europe via
> satellite - just like the local BBCs in the UK.
> 
> The demand for a information oriented channel which provides real news and
> which is quick to react to breaking stories is there. I have no research to
> provide numbers, but all of the students for example never watch LF or a lot
> of MDR. They say, LF is too bad and MDR is for old people. And all those
> people who really work would like to have something uptodate. That's why the
> news radio MDR Info fills the information gap left by MDR TV very well. So I
> guess a TV channel doing the same thing would get even more attention.
> 
> Is GStreamer a stand alone application in windows or does that still have to
> be written?

  GStreamer is a multimedia application framework, it is *NOT* an
application. You can *WRITE* software using it in order to achieve what
you want. A lot of the building blocks you need are already available in
the form of plugins.

> 
> SCENARIO:
> I think I need three computers for news-input
> 1. switches between the (at least) 4 Studio cameras
> 2. has the correspondents or outside live shots
> 3 has the breaking news livestreams
> 
> I already have created an American local TV weather animation file with
> Scala Info Channel Designer. In order to superimpose that on the green
> screen do I have to do it before I feed the wheather-anchor's studio cam
> into the camera-inputs computer or later?

  Same comment as in my initial reply, you'll have to write something to
be able to feed/use the Scala data.

> 
> Computer 4 is the master control input of the 3 above - or 4 if I do weather
> on a seperate one. That is the one that hold the intros, titles and animated
> backgrounds.
> Computer 5 scales and encodes the content in windows media for the internet
> and mpeg2 for broadcast.

  That last computer will need to be VERY fast.

> 
> Would this scenario work? Or is there a way to do it with less computers? Do
> I lose quality by doing that? Is it possibe to feed the material from the 3
> inputs as "raw video-out" unencoded into the fourth?

  Looks like a doable scenario, feeding raw data across computers is
doable and recommended (you just need a fast network connection between
all of these computers).

> How much memory, CPU-power and what big a harddrive do should each of the
> computers have?

  Only testing will tell you for sure, the more memory/cpu/hdd the
better.

> 
> Thanks again for your help
> Juergen
> 
> 
>