Use A Custom Miro For Church Videos and Conference
Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 11:08 am
Ok, there was already a bit of BitTorrent talk here: http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=562
In it I mentioned the idea of using Miro, having just finished watching Conference I want to expand on it.
In my city in Alberta, we're fortunate enough to have conference viewable on cable TV. Problem is that the Saturday afternoon session was pre-empted by a local football game and I had to fire up the laptop to watch.
The Windows Media feed would not even come up and the Move Networks feed was 32k/s, like watching old seminary slide shows. It paused so much that we finished watching conference at 4:30, 30 minutes after it had actually ended.
Enter Miro: http://www.getmiro.com/
Miro is an Open Source video distribution platform. It combines a media player with a video catalog and a BitTorrent client, and it is available on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Look at the demo video at http://www.getmiro.com/screencasts/ and imagine with me...
You customize Miro, create a channel for the current conference session. Someone runs a box with a realtime h.264 encoder. You can get a 20 minute conference talk into about 3-4 megs, call it 10 for fullscreen broadcast quality.
You push these out as soon as a given talk finishes and add them to the channel list. Within minutes the video will spread out among members, with so many pulling the talk the bandwidth for members to grab the talk will allow them to get it within minutes. The church's bandwidth cost will be low because they only seed it to the first 50-100 users, then it spreads via bittorrent. The members can get broadcast quality video of conference and only be one or two talks back. Miro could be configured to do a more regular pull on the live conference session and automatically play each entry in the queue as they download.
When not being used for conference, the system could still be an on-demand catalog of church videos and other talks in regional conferences and whatnot.
Imagine being able to search through the entire catalog of church videos and pull them on demand? You could even add functionality to automate the burning of a church video to DVD so people could watch them easily on their TVs.
Something like this would be really easy to do since the core work is already done by the Miro team, it would just be a matter of maintaining a branch.
In it I mentioned the idea of using Miro, having just finished watching Conference I want to expand on it.
In my city in Alberta, we're fortunate enough to have conference viewable on cable TV. Problem is that the Saturday afternoon session was pre-empted by a local football game and I had to fire up the laptop to watch.
The Windows Media feed would not even come up and the Move Networks feed was 32k/s, like watching old seminary slide shows. It paused so much that we finished watching conference at 4:30, 30 minutes after it had actually ended.
Enter Miro: http://www.getmiro.com/
Miro is an Open Source video distribution platform. It combines a media player with a video catalog and a BitTorrent client, and it is available on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Look at the demo video at http://www.getmiro.com/screencasts/ and imagine with me...
You customize Miro, create a channel for the current conference session. Someone runs a box with a realtime h.264 encoder. You can get a 20 minute conference talk into about 3-4 megs, call it 10 for fullscreen broadcast quality.
You push these out as soon as a given talk finishes and add them to the channel list. Within minutes the video will spread out among members, with so many pulling the talk the bandwidth for members to grab the talk will allow them to get it within minutes. The church's bandwidth cost will be low because they only seed it to the first 50-100 users, then it spreads via bittorrent. The members can get broadcast quality video of conference and only be one or two talks back. Miro could be configured to do a more regular pull on the live conference session and automatically play each entry in the queue as they download.
When not being used for conference, the system could still be an on-demand catalog of church videos and other talks in regional conferences and whatnot.
Imagine being able to search through the entire catalog of church videos and pull them on demand? You could even add functionality to automate the burning of a church video to DVD so people could watch them easily on their TVs.
Something like this would be really easy to do since the core work is already done by the Miro team, it would just be a matter of maintaining a branch.