[xine-user] How Xine (and POE) saved BayCon TV

[Stephen N. <sen...@td...>]

Hi all... wanted to share my experiences of the past few weeks...

Every year in San Jose there's a science fiction convention called
BayCon (http://www.baycon.org). A bunch of science fiction fans get
together at a DoubleTree hotel for Memorial Day weekend to meet their
favorite writers and artists and hang out together. For the people who
are actually staying in the hotel, there is an in-hotel TV station (we
take over Channel 4) called BayCon TV, or BCTV for short. We play
interviews with our guests of honor, footage taped during the con, fan
videos, old movies, and slides of science fiction history and trivia.
This year, my wife and I were in charge of it.

When BCTV has been running in the past, the crew would build huge
videotapes full of content, then have to wake up in the middle of the
night to switch them out. If they missed a tape change, or if some
footage was shorter than expected, the entire schedule could be thrown
off. Finally, they couldn't do things like accept fan videos and digital
photos at the convention-- everything had been pretaped!

Ever since I first heard of BCTV, I had been thinking that it would be
much nicer to run things digitally, and in overcaffeinated moments
concocted huge, Rube Goldberg-style plans to play the many different
kinds of media we needed to accept. As I got further along, I realized
that a) my plans were far too complicated to succeed, and b) even if
everything worked, the screen would flicker as I made the transition
between one output program and another.

After sitting down and studying Xine for a while, I realized that it was
exactly what I needed. It played all of the kinds of media I was likely
to be given, and then some. Plus, I could control it via the network
interface. I exised huge swaths of unneeded code, and the entire system
turned into just Xine as the front end controlled by timing code written
using POE, the Perl Object Environment. I changed the logo image to the
BCTV logo and was good to go. (Additional thanks go to helpful users
here who assisted me with getting Mac Quicktime files to play over Xine.
Resource forks can be irritating to deal with.) I hooked up an NVidia
card with TV out, configured the system for twinview, and started
broadcasting.

Performance-wise I had some mixed results. Xine had to run for about 36
hours straight; unrelated reboots brought that down to about 8. After a
few hours, I noticed some severe framedropping going on. This would
clear up after restarting the program. I haven't done much system
tweaking, and I'll come back with some more definitive results after
doing some more system testing. The system seemed very stable. Most of
the glitches we had were due to me having to edit the schedule file for
my timing system by hand and making mistakes!

Now that we've got a good platform to build on, I'm hoping to make the
BCTV broadcast system easier to use for next year.  After that point, I
might try doing some fancier things: using the overlay generator for
scrolling announcements at the bottom of the screen, for example.

So I'd like to thank everyone on the Xine team. Thanks to you, my wife
and I were able to get some sleep during Con, and not have to keep
switching tapes all the time! I'll keep you posted for future
developments.