Re: [Tools-discuss] Proposal to discontinue live mp3 audio streams at IETF meetings

[Tom Pusateri <[e-mail]>]

> On Oct 1, 2020, at 4:36 PM, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Adam Roach <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>> On 10/1/2020 11:33 AM, Michael Richardson wrote:
>>> I understand.  I would request that the mp4's that are produced and
>>> uploaded to youtube be made available via some other site as well.
> 
>> I'd make the same request. A little bit ago, I went to try to find the
>> audio stream for a recent meeting, and was perplexed that the
>> recordings no longer existed. I'm sympathetic to the concerns that
>> Michael expressed; I also note that, even if you're willing to deal
>> with big tech platforms, the inability to download a local copy of
>> material from YouTube is a very unfortunate drawback.
> 
> Well, there tools that will do this, but youtube tries to break them, I
> think. :-)
> 
>> As an aside: prior to the youtubization of sessions, it was possible to
>> grab the individual media components from the meetecho recordings,
>> which was *even nicer*. For example, the HRPCRG had a very interesting
>> spot in their session where EFF's Eva Galperin gave a slide-free talk
>> that I shared with some colleagues. In the old format, I could have
>> pointed to the speaker video stream, which would have been nice. On
>> YouTube, the lack of slides meant that the speaker view was rendered as
>> 1/16th of the frame in the upper-right-hand corner, while the remaining
>> 15/16ths of the screen was blank. I'm not necessarily asking for that
>> format to be restored, but it would make for a replacement of the MP3
>> streams that isn't merely adequate, but actually quite superior.
> 
> I agree it would be nice to have the media components.
> It might also allow for interesting remixes later on.
> 
> Also the meetecho recording does not include the jabber/chat view, the
> participant queue (to see who is speaking), or the vote/hum results.
> So even though you have jabber logs, it's difficult to easily see exactly
> what it relates to.
> 
> The best part about watching the recordings though, is 2x playback speed :-)

I have argued in the past that all of the media from IETF should be available in non-proprietary formats as stream components for tools and user interface people to combine them and use the components in more user friendly ways than simply archiving everything in Youtube.

I was told no to this. I think this is a mistake.

The IETFers app used to be a significant user of the audio streams. I provided live streaming as well as recorded playback of a session. This was difficult because the stream info for a sessions was not algorithmic. I had to release a new version of the app each meeting to map stream numbers to rooms. I received tons of compliments on this and people loved this feature.

When this was the only reason left to release a new version of the app for each meeting, I dropped the recordings but I always wanted to come up with a way to re-instate this functionality because the low bandwidth audio stream was so much more useful on a mobile device than the youtube. It was possible to stream a session over cellular in your car while the youtube would take significant bandwidth.

Not only do I not want this to go away, I want all of the material to be available in open formats. This includes:

1. audio (presenter in one channel, audience mics in another channel would be even better)
2. slide video
3. speaker video
4. slide files

It makes perfect sense that the number of people using this recently is low. It’s difficult to use in its current form. It shouldn’t be this way.

Tom