AirMozilla

Overview

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

Air Mozilla is the web site for viewing live Mozilla video streams. The site will also feature recordings of those live events for anyone who missed the live broadcast. Events include Mozilla project meetings, brownbags, developer chats, design luncheons, etc.

The Airmoz v2 page holds ideas and info on upgrading Airmoz to use better tools.

Basic Features

1. streaming video
2. web based IRC chat
3. on-demand content (video and sync'd irc logs)
4. authentication for confidential content
5. management interface for content producers (me)
6. deployable as a package for other Mozilla organizations or third parties

Current Setup

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.

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