[cr-india] Free Media Software Production ...

[Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया]]

* European Broadcasting Union held its first Fire and OPen Source
Software Seminar in Geneva, in early October 2007. Three main themes
emerged during the course of the seminar. The first was that Free
Software really works, and is already in use by European broadcasters,
for both proof-of-concept and production systems. The second theme was
that Free Software can save EBU members a great deal of time and money
by providing building blocks for bespoke solutions. The third key
theme was that commodity, general-purpose hardware, when combined with
Free Software, is now able to replace specialised broadcast hardware
which can cost ten times as much.

* Check out the Kamaelia component framework,
http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net Kamaelia is a testbed for network
experimentation, using a component architecture designed to simplify
creation and testing of new protocols for large scale media delivery
systems. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamaelia]

* TO fight interoperable challenges between field reporters and
studios, the EBU has set up a working group for a new audio
contribution over IP standard, a project based at
http://www.ebu-acip.org

* The Communcations Research Centre Canada (CRC) has been working on
software defined radio, and demonstrated a working DAB/DMB broadcast
system running on a normal laptop with just a small general-purpose
radio device connected by USB, and an upconverter for the radio
signal. Effectively replacing an entire rack of expensive broadcast
hardware, the system would be likely to give the average government
spectrum regulator a panic attack. It can potentially broadcast any
tope of signal on any frequency. See http://eng.t-dmb.org for more
details). More about CRC's work at
http://www.crc.ca/en/html/mmb/home/tools

* Campcaster is a Free Software radio automation platform that's
already in production use around the world.  See
http://www.campware.org where it can be downloaded from as source
code. There are also Debian and Ubuntu apt repositories available for
users that want to keep up with the latest releases for those distros.

* Already digital cinema cameras like the Red One [http://www.red.com]
are putting very high quality image and sound recording equipment into
the hands of independent producers.

* BBC's David Kirby presented a tapless production system called
Ingex, which has already been used successfully. Ingex is based around
two GNU/Linux boxes, a recorder/transcoder on the studio floor, and a
distribution server, which can be some distance apart; connected as
they are by a fibre link.  Apart from saving tedious, often late-night
work with tape ingest, this means that TV programmes can now reach the
editing stage more quickly, and so the Ingex system has been very well
received by the BBC producers, directors and technical staff who have
tried it. It runs Samba with a virtual filesystem extension called
MediaHarmony, which allows Ingex to serve the same video and audio
data to both Avid and Final Cut Pro-based edit suites, but in the
different formats that each proprietary editing application
requires...  http://ingex.sourceforge.net

[Above info from an article "Free media production software" by Daniel
James, Linux Format, Christmas 2007.]
--
Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org Ph 0091-832-2409490
12000+ downloadable, sharable hi-res photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/