AirMozilla

Overview

Air Mozilla is the video (multimedia) presence of Mozilla on the Web.

Air Mozilla presents live video streams of Mozilla community events around the world as well as an archive containing recordings of previous live events. There is a self-service interface for uploading pre-recorded videos.

Events include Mozilla project meetings, brownbags, developer chats, design luncheons and meet-up events in Mozilla spaces.

Topic-specific channels allow grouping of recordings by area of interest. Community members who would like to curate a channel are invited to contact the Air Mozilla Staff.

History

Air Mozilla began as a streaming audio service to make project meetings more accessible to remote participants. By 2007 it was streaming video on a monthly basis.

In 2009, Aza Dotzler, Air Mozilla's creator, described the technology for the first streaming video implementation:

"Right now, I'm using a cobbled together set of tools. The local part doesn't matter to you all (yet,) but I'm sharing it anyway. On my local machine, I'm capturing the video (dvgrab) encoding the DV stream to Theora (ffmpeg2theora) saving a local copy (tee to local file) and pushing the bits (oggfwd) to an icecast server. Then I've got a WordPress install where I have our Air Mozilla web page that embeds the stream using the video tag. On that page I've also got an embedded IRC chat (mibbit) in an iFrame. When the live streaming event is over, I upload the copy of the video I saved locally using WordPress's upload feature and then I link the video in the WordPress page using a bit of JS that will dynamically swap out the src URL in the video tag when someone clicks it."

In late 2011 Air Mozilla was rebooted under the stewardship of Richard Milewski. The Mozilla WebDev team provided a design refresh of the Wordpress blog to bring the site in line with then-current Mozilla website design standards.

In 2012 the Wordpress Blog was replaced with a Django/Playdoh custom CMS system implemented by Peter Bengtsson and Mozilla Intern Tim Mickel. (You can see Tim's intern brownbag in the Air Mozilla archive).

Dream Set-up

Assuming that the end state of the local toolchain is a video streaming through an IceCast server, here's what I think a great Web site set-up would look like.

1. an "end user" Web page that includes the video, the irc chat, and a selection widget of some kind for loading up recorded content. (I'll provide some design mock-ups soon)# a demo-worthy set of player controls for the video element. (we should not be relying on the remedial built-in controls)
2. a management interface for producers (people like me) that includes
   1. access/authentication system
   2. easy mechanism for uploading videos and IRC transcripts
   3. configuration for organizing recorded videos in the selection widget
   4. configuration for the "default" video if no live stream happening
   5. configuration for the built in IRC client (default nick, channel to join, etc.)
   6. integration of the IceCast management pages
   7. ability to stop and start IceCast, delete sources, edit icecast.xml, etc.
3. a simple theme system that allows for basic customization of the main page so others can deploy with their own branding.
4. a package easily deployed by Mozilla Europe, Japan, China, etc.
5. some analytics
6. subscription / syndication goodies
7. sharing and social networking goodies
8. excerpting and easy "embedding" goodies

Additional Notes

You can see my preliminary site at http://air.mozilla.org.

Sexy feature idea: If we have a recorded video from an interactive session that included IRC chat and we have IRC chat logs with timestamps, we should be able to sync the video and the log so that when the video plays, the IRC chat log is scrolled at the appropriate rates. Cool, huh.

Third party projects we are or will be using (unless you all can recommend better) IRC http://cgiirc.org/ http://www.icecast.org/

Additional technologies to consider: http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch05.html http://www.flumotion.net