[pp.int.general] PPI GA Prague / Video Conference System for remote delegates

[Wolfgang Preiss]

> Sorry, maybe I got a bit confused. I did not say there was any problem 
> with it. Can you tell us more about the pirate streaming? If it is 
> done with unemcumbered codecs and accessible to free software users, 
> than there's no problem.

I feel like I have described that a hundered times before ;-)

So once again:

Pirate Streaming is a Service, which is indepedent from any pirate 
party, but is a section of the organisation pirates without bordes for a 
bit over 6 months now. Before that, Pirate Streaming worked completely 
independently.

We provide Streaming Services for any pirate group, so far mainly in 
germany and switzerland. This starts at providing a streaming server 
(wowza media server) which is free of collecting any user data (we got a 
certification for that) up to full services like showing up at the 
location with our hardware (HD Camcorders, framegrabbers, audio 
equipment, etc) - we only charge as much so upcoming costs are covered + 
a small fee for PwB in order to support live streaming events free of 
charge like PPI GA if the organisation lacks of financial resources.

Pirate Streaming owns a few domains:

Piraten-Streaming.de, Piraten-Streaming.ch (which are in German)
Pirate-Streaming.net (english)

An (incomplete) List of streaming events can be checked at: 
http://www.piraten-streaming.de/?page_id=603

As you can see the earliest date of an event is April 10th, 2010 - 
almost 2 Years ago

Our main goal is to provide a tool for political transparency. We do not 
jundge or comment the content of the video, we only do transport. 
Additionally we wanted to provide a video stream which is fully free of 
advertising, and does not collect any userdata via google ads or similar.
We are guaranteed by wowza inc. that using their software will not 
transfere any data (except for checking licence) to them. Additionally 
our website has the certification "Wir speichern nicht" (we do not save) 
- which is a certification by the AK VDS (anyone got english information 
about that?- more details on german at http://www.wirspeichernnicht.de/ 
) - this certification proves that our system is designed not to save 
any IP adresses or additional user information. All the statistics are 
saved using the IP 127.0.0.1 in order to respect our visitors privacy.

The last event was the General Assembly of the Pirate Party Germany in 
Offenbach, which had a maximum of 1250 parallel viewers. More Details 
can be requested.

As comparison: If you order an "comercial" streaming service for such an 
event, you'd be in a pricerange of about 4.000€ to 6.000€ at least. We 
covered all cost with 700€ for this event. This also included setting up 
an internet satellite uplink.

The PPI Streaming Event is calculated with about 300€ (because Praque is 
very close to my place, this reduces the traffel costs a lot) - however 
we decided to support it free of charge, because the financial situation 
of PPI is not a secret. So far I have decided to cover these costs 
privately, yesterday evening the Pirates without Borders has decided to 
cover theses costs for me - so PwB is now the official stream supporter 
of the PPI GA by definition.

Now to get to the more technical details, which you requested:

We use a Wowza Media Server. This provides the stream using the 
transportation protocols rtmp and rtsp using the codecs V8 or H.264 for 
video and MP3 or ACC for audio.

I usually stream using H.264 and ACC or MP3 due to compatibily reasons 
for apple handheld devices.

On my website I use the open source JW Player, which is based on flash. 
I think it should work with gnash, but have no detailed feedback for 
that yet.

You can use any rtsp player to watch my streams, eg VLC

 From my experiance the ratio RTSP Viewers to Flash Viewers is 1:10 to 1:20

This means: for every user who does not want or cannot use the flash 
player and decides to use the rtsp stream there are 10 to 20 users using 
the flash player.

With this setup I don't get any negative feedback whatsoever - except 
for THIS list.

I have served thousands of viewers in the last 2 years, and now get the 
demand, to stop streaming unless I do it with OGG? I guess you 
understand how weird this is.

Now lets get back to the original posting of mine considering the video 
conference system:

I wanted to use a system which makes moderated video conferencing 
possible. It should be as simple as possible for the user, after I 
didn't want to expect a user who maybe participates once a year to 
install software for this, which maybe has additional costs.
As far as I know there is no other technology to gain access to your 
webcam and microfon on a web based system except for flash - not talking 
of ready to use software.
After the conference system is only used for the delegates to interact 
with each other I considered using a flash based system could be 
accepted - the live stream for viewers who doesn't need to interact is 
not touched by this decision - the livestream still will be available 
via rtsp. You could even get the single video channels of the 
participants of the video conference via rtsp without using flash.

However only the idea of mentioning flash seems to be equal to eating 
babies - or even worse - also skype as a solution we had last year at 
the GA seems to be out of question according to the god of free software 
(guess I will burn in hell anyway)

As I said: no other pirate in germany/switzerland was bashing me for my 
services so far, after it always was based on the idea to provide it 
ad-free, cost-free, independent, without collecting data, without the 
need to install additional software. Actually there are even other 
political parties and groups requesting my opinion about streaming and 
even request my services for their events.

The main problem is, that here on this list I get the impression that I 
only can fail, no matter what I do.

My goal was to present a solution to the organisation team/PPI Board, 
which could be used. However it does not make sense to provide a 
solution which is already rejected by the potential users in the first 
place.

At the moment I am out of options, as any system which were suggested 
either is based on flash for using the webcam or microfone, is only 
availabe for windows, or only available for linux, or free conference 
solutions do not provide video stream at all, because of the free 
concept which does not allow the use of h.264 and ACC.

I never felt that close to give up as now. And from my point it kinda 
feels sad that political transparency is being sacrificed to ideology 
ideas, as stallman suggested. Better no political transparence if used 
with the "wrong" software.

Wolfgang