Streaming in the Burg

Last Tuesday’s Bristol Dorkbot event had a change of venue, moving to St Werburgh’s Community Centre. Perhaps on this account or the impending Yuletide mayhem, attendance was disappointing.

However, those who did not show up missed two excellent reasons for coming:

• bottles of genuine Irish Guinness weighing in at 7.5% alcohol; and
• Mike Harris of Psand.net on audio and video streaming using open source technologies.

Mike’s a Bristol Wireless volunteer, like myself, but also has the distinction of being a founder of Dorkbot Barcelona. He’s involved in running two media streaming projects – Radio Vague and its companion, Vague TV.

Standing before a trolley full of audio kit – microphone, sounddesk, compressor, USB audio device – and laptop, Mike kept up a constant stream of audio (at background level in the room itself through the small PA rig). We all huddled up close so Mike didn’t have to use his namesake.

He began by telling us he started working at festivals to avoid having to pay for admission, eventually ending up doing audio streaming for Lost Vagueness at the Glastonbury Festival, hence the Radio Vague name.

We then lifted the bonnet on the audio stream to which we were listening, in this case a playlist of the laptop (running Linux, of course). This audio signal was split by a package called Ardour to produce two streams – one for firing up the network cable to the internet, the other an audio file saved to the laptop’s hard drive as a record (or archive) of the audio stream. Any kind of audio input can be streamed – DJ in club or bedroom, live band, conference and so on. Your audio is streamed via the ices program to a broadcast server running icecast which then pumps it out to the internet and your audience. Video streaming works on the same principles.

There’s more about streaming at Radio Vague and information about the ices and icecast packages is available from icecast.org.

Hopefully with the days getting longer again after the solstice later this week, I’ll be able to get the theremin built and then who knows? A duet with a musical saw has been mentioned