Streaming iPhoneDevCamp Munich

On August 1st, 2009, Boinx Software was co-host of the first iPhoneDevCamp in Germany. The event was a big success, maxing out the capacity of the venue with almost 50 attendees despite the event having been announced only a week before. With talks about business and technology aspects of the iPhone eco-system, interest was huge, so, in order to allow a much bigger audience, it was decided to provide both a live stream and archive recordings of the talks using BoinxTV.

Although very nice weather ensnared people to go to the beer gardens, up to 250 people followed the live stream and many thousands more downloaded the archive recordings which were provided through an iTunes podcast feed for offline viewing.

Cameras

Two Canon HV-30 cameras in DV widescreen mode were used to provide the video of two different view angles. To bridge the distance between the cameras and the MacPro running BoinxTV, they were connected using FireNEX extenders. The MacPro was equipped with an additional FireWire card to enable two FireWire cameras to be operated at the same time.

Syncing Audio and Video

Audio was captured using an Alesis MultiMix 16 FireWire Audio Mixer. The issue here is that cameras take a little time to encode the video and that time is different from the time the Alesis Audio Mixer takes for encoding the audio. Thanks to a new feature of BoinxTV 1.3 which allows to set a delay for the audio device in order to get the audio and video in sync, the audio could be provided via the Alesis digitally, resulting in superb audio quality.

Capturing Slides

One challenge every event of this kind faces is how to get the presenter's slides from PowerPoint or Keynote into the video. In this case, the problem was solved by adding an Intensity card by Blackmagic-Design providing an HDMI input to the MacPro and connecting the presenter's laptop through an DVI to HDMI cable to that card. An HDMI splitter and another HDMI to DVI cable where used to provide that same signal to the projector at the same time.

Capturing iPhone Screen

For an afternoon session titled "iPhone Apps showcase" it was required to capture the screen of an iPhone for the live stream/recording and to present it on the projector. This required the use of a specially prepared iPhone running ScreenSplitr. This iPhone was connected with the Apple Composite AV Cable to the composite video input of a Canopus ADVC 110. The Canopus, in turn, was connected using FireWire to the MacPro.

A special layer was created for BoinxTV that showed the screen of the iPhone composited inside a picture of the iPhone. Since the iPhone screen can change orientation by rotating the device, the layer has a setting that allows for the two different video signals resulting from this to be properly placed, scaled and cropped.

During discussions, when the iPhone video was not required, the Canopus ADVC was used to connect a third, hand-held Canon HV-30 camera that took images of the audience.

Live Stream

The event was streamed live over the Internet using the uStream service. This required the video signal created by BoinxTV to be output in full screen on the secondary display output of the MacPro and fed via a VGA cable to a secondary computer with an Epiphan VGA2USB device attached. The software of the VGA2USB provides a video source that can be used with the uStream web interface to feed the video into uStream.

The video stream was active for almost 6 hours with a short break for lunch.

Archive and iTunes Feed

While providing the live stream, BoinxTV at the same time recorded the event to disk, creating a high quality version. This was later cut into segments representing the individual talks, transcoded to H.264 using an Elgato Turbo.264 HD stick and uploaded to blip.tv for hosting.

Finally, to enable viewers to download the recorded video to their iPhones and iPods, an iTunes feed was created and published.

Watch the developer presentations...