World's First Large-Scale Ogg Theora Stream

Ur@eus writes "The GNOME European Users and Developers conference is currently underway in Kristansand, Norway. The whole conference is available live online as an Ogg Theora stream (the videos of the talks are also archived). This is very exciting as it is a proof of concept that it is possible to do high quality streaming using a fully free format today. The stream is done using the Fluendo streaming server software which will be released under the GPL in a few months. You find information on how to view the streams at the GUADEC streaming website."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[BFaucet]

I believe the significance of this is that now there's a large stream available on the web... that you can point people to. Saying to someone that a ogg streams rock is very different than showing them.

Hopefully radio stations and Public Radio shows will adopt Ogg. At the moment, most if not all use Real *shudder*.

bork

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very exciting...

Nope, sorry. Just because something is done with an open source whatever, does not automatically make the event exciting, significant, groundbreaking, or anything else out of the ordinary.

See that headline?

[Chuck Chunder]

The one that says:

World's First Large-Scale Ogg Theora Stream

The concept that is being proved is the "Ogg Theora as a large scale streaming technology" one.

Re:Huh?

[Psymunn]

Forgive me for beign naive, but if i went up to the magority of people i know and said 'hey man, there's this kick ass confrence streaming on the internet, and guess what: it's OGG' i'd receive a whoel lot of WTF.
Don't get me wrong, i support ogg because it's 'free as in awesome', and i hate realplayer because it's 'annoying as in YAPI' (yet another plug in) but i think another format is just going to confuse new users.
What's more, joe user isn't truly going to embrace something like ogg until bob porn producer does.

Re:Huh?

[aldoman]

But Real does seem to be making some effort with the Helix community.

We could soon see Ogg being installed (as both a directshow filter and in RealPlayer itself) on a large amount of computers. I also know that most games now use ogg for sound effects, but I'm not so sure if they install it as a directshow filter (this allows other apps to use it). If they do, then we may already have 25% of the home computer market using ogg.

BTW: this method of stealth installation is going to be how OS software takes hold, imo.

Re:Excellent

[bazongis]

Maybe this has to do with the fact that conference rooms in the middle of the night with their lights switched off are not exactly an exciting scene to stream live?

In other words: the streaming servers are probably switched off. Try again tomorrow morning (Norwegian time).

I've watched some of the live streams yesterday and today, and overall it was quite impressive (the only comparison I have are realplayer streams of recorded TV newscasts at roughly the same bitrate, which always freeze to refill the buffer at some point).

Try helping people instead of justifying rejection

[jbn-o]

[...] if i went up to the magority of people i know and said 'hey man, there's this kick ass confrence streaming on the internet, and guess what: it's OGG' i'd receive a whoel lot of WTF.

The same could be said of when RealVideo was new or when MP3 began. Novelty is no reason to reject something but being proprietary is. Conversely, as you indicated, being free is a great reason to support this work. My experience is that if you're willing to spend a few seconds explaining the problem with proprietary software you will be taken seriously. But if you signal that the issue of software freedom doesn't matter, you're telling people that they can safely dismiss it too.

Re:Anticlimax

[evilviper]

It would be a lot more impressive if the stream hadn't GROUND to a SCREECHING HALT within 5 minutes of being posted...

If you are using a /.ing to prove that a certain technology is not up-to-snuff, then you must also agree that the internet as a whole is a failed technology.

Nothing can survive having more users than bandwidth.