Emacs Conf video tech notes: jit.si, twitch.tv, livestreamer, ffmpeg

Posted: - Modified: | emacs, geek, ffmpeg, streaming

Last week’s Emacs Conf was fantastic. There were lots of people at the in-person event in San Francisco, and people could also watch the stream through twitch.tv and ask questions through IRC. There were remote speakers and in-person speakers, and that mix even worked for the impromptu lightning talks sprinkled throughout the day.

This is how the tech worked:

  • Before the conference started, the organizers set up a laptop for streaming on twitch.tv/emacsconf. This was hooked up to the main display (a large television with speakers). They also configured the account to record and archive videos. In the free account, recorded videos are available for 14 days.
  • Remote speakers were brought in using the Jitsi open source video conferencing system, using the public servers at meet.jit.si. This was on the same computer that did the twitch.tv streaming, so people watching the stream could see whatever was shared through Jitsi. Organizers read out questions from the in-person audience and from the IRC channel. The audio from Jitsi wasn’t directly available through twitch.tv, though. Instead, the audio came in as a recording from the laptop’s microphone.
  • Local speakers either used the streaming laptop to go to a specific webpage they wanted to talk about, or joined the Jitsi web conference using Google Chrome or Chromium so that they could share their screen. The organizers muted the second Jitsi client to avoid audio feedback loops.

That worked out really well. There were more than a hundred remote viewers. As one of them, I can definitely rate the experience as surprisingly smooth.

All that’s left now is to figure out how to make a more lasting archive of the Emacs Conf videos. As it turns out, twitch.tv or online tools don’t make it easy to download stream recordings that are longer than three hours. Fortunately, livestreamer can handle the job. Here’s what I did to download the timestream data from one of the recordings of EmacsConf:

livestreamer -o emacsconf-1.ts --hls-segment-threads 4 http://www.twitch.tv/emacsconf/v/13421774 best
ffmpeg -i emacsconf-1.ts -acodec copy -absf aac_adtstoasc -vcodec copy emacsconf-1.mp4

I normally use Camtasia Studio to edit videos, but for some reason, it kept flaking out on me today. After the umpteenth crash, I decided to keep things simple by using ffmpeg to extract the relevant part of the video. To extract a segment, you can use -ss to specify the start time and t to specify the duration. Here’s a sample command:

ffmpeg -i emacsconf-1.mp4 -ss 1:18:06.11 -t 0:03:32.29 -c:v copy -c:a copy emacsconf-engine-mode.mp4

Your version of ffmpeg might have a -to option, which would let you specify the end time instead of using -t to specify duration.

I’m coordinating with the other organizers to see if there’s a better way to process the videos, so that’s why we haven’t released them publicly yet. (Soon!) It would be nice to improve the audio, especially for some of the talks, and maybe it would be good to add overlays or zoom in as well. The on-site organizers captured backup videos and screen recordings, too, so we might want to edit some of those clips into the streamed recording. One of the organizers has access to better video editing tools, so we’ll try that out.

Anyway, those were the commands that helped me get started with command-line conversion and editing of Twitch.tv recorded videos. Hope they come in handy for other people too.

For more info about EmacsConf 2015, check out http://emacsconf2015.org/. There’ll probably be an announcement there once the videos are up. =)

Hat tip to Reddit and superuser.com for tips.

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