Getting started

Welcome to the DebConf video team documentation. The goal of this website is to give you the necessary tools to replicate our setup as closely as possible. It also includes some extra information about tips and tricks we find useful when dealing with equipment, volunteers and speakers.

If you are part of the Debian community and plan to organise an event you intend to record, please consult this guide detailing how we can work together. Maybe a member of our team can attend it and help you with your setup. If not, we can certainly give you some advice or lend you some hardware.

Our documentation is divided in a way that makes it easy for you to replicate what we do. First, take a look at the Hardware we use to see what kind of gear you will need. Once that is done you should check out the article on how to use our Ansible playbooks to setup the different machines you’ll be using.

The external setup for Streaming architecture and video reviewing described here can be a lot of trouble to set. If you don’t want to do this yourself and you are organising something related to Debian, send us a mail on our mailing list and we’ll see if you can use our instances.

Our general setup

If you are not familiar with our work, our goal is to record various conferences related to Debian during the year.

We do so on a mix of hardware we own and hardware we rent. You can learn more about the general physical Room setup we use.. The output from the cameras and the microphone is sent to our live-mixing computer running voctomix. The footage that is mixed live is then saved on the local computer’s disk and live streamed online.

Once the talk is over, the local recording is sent to a central server to be reviewed and further edited by a member of the team. Once that is done, we transcode the raw files to an acceptable filesize and upload it to our Video archive.