Offenbar spielt da gerade ein von mir nicht zu verantwortendes Skript verrückt – Schrankmonster wird zur Zeit nämlich 1:1 schamlos kopiert

Ich freue mich natürlich darüber und habe direkt mal die Google FeedAds eingeschaltet…

P.S.: Bitte bau noch einer von den Blog Administratoren dass die Umlaute richtig übernommen werden – so ist das ja alles nur halb so hübsch.

Source: http://blog.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/

Since last year FeM is recording and live streaming the annual Formula Student Event in Germany:

“Screeching tires, smouldering heads and impressive technical innovations – welcome to the Formula Student Germany 2008!
Join the Brunel Race at our stand. As a virtual race driver you’ll be able to win the Grand Prix at the Hockenheimring. The fastest driver gets the chance to win 2 tickets for the Formula 1 Event at Nürburgring 2009.”

If you don’t know what Formula Student is…you may want to read this:

“Students build a single seat formula racecar with which they can compete against teams from all over the world. The competition is not won solely by the team with the fastest car, but rather by the team with the best overall package of construction, performance, and financial and sales planning.

Formula Student challenges the team members to go the extra step in their education by incorporating into it intensive experience in building and manufacturing as well as considering the economic aspects of the automotive industry. Teams take on the assumption that they are a manufacturer developing a prototype to be evaluated for production. The target audience is the non-professional Weekend-Racer, for which the racecar must show very good driving characteristics such as acceleration, braking and handling. It should be offered at a very reasonable cost and be reliable and dependable. Additionally, the car’’s market value increases through other factors such as aesthetics, comfort and the use of readily available, standard purchase components.

The challenge the teams face is to compose a complete package consisting of a well constructed racecar and a sales plan that best matches these given criteria. The decision is made by a jury of experts from the motorsport, automotive and supplier industries. The jury will judge every team’s car and sales plan based on construction, cost planning and sales presentation. The rest of the judging will be done out on the track, where the students demonstrate in a number of performance tests how well their self-built racecars fare in their true environment.”

Starting this friday there will be a livestream available (Flash and Windows Media). Great stuff!

Source 1: Livestream
Source 2: http://formulastudent.tv/
Source 3: http://www.formulastudent.de

I am once again pleased to present the official Trailer for this years FIWAK. FIWAK is the annual outdoor-conference presented by FeM e.V.. This year these lectures are planned (german only):

• Openstreetmap-Workshop von Markus Brückner und Dominik Tritscher
• Technische Grundlagen DVB-T von Sebastian Schwarz
• Opensource Videobearbeitung von Florian Raschke
• FeM-Geschichte von Mario Holbe
• Vereinsinterne Kommunikation von Michael Bock
• Tanzworkshop mit Udo Pescheck
• Bewerbungstraining mit MLP
• Whiteboard-Technologien von Smart Systems

FIWAK takes place from 20. to 22. June 2008 in the forest around Elgersburg – a small town near Ilmenau. But now watch the trailer:

Source 1: FIWAK Homepage

Uhh it seems that someone got hold of a power cord … and did a bad bad thing:

Ahzf took some pictures… coooooool:

Source: blog.ahzf.de

Everybody needs more than one job these days and so does FeM. One team at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 and one at the Hockenheimring, recording and live streaming the events.

You may ask what “Formula Student” is…:

“Students build a single seat formula racecar with which they can compete against teams from all over the world. The competition is not won solely by the team with the fastest car, but rather by the team with the best overall package of construction, performance, and financial and sales planning.

Formula Student challenges the team members to go the extra step in their education by incorporating into it intensive experience in building and manufacturing as well as considering the economic aspects of the automotive industry. Teams take on the assumption that they are a manufacturer developing a prototype to be evaluated for production. The target audience is the non-professional Weekend-Racer, for which the racecar must show very good driving characteristics such as acceleration, braking and handling. It should be offered at a very reasonable cost and be reliable and dependable. Additionally, the car’’s market value increases through other factors such as aesthetics, comfort and the use of readily available, standard purchase components.

The challenge the teams face is to compose a complete package consisting of a well constructed racecar and a sales plan that best matches these given criteria. The decision is made by a jury of experts from the motorsport, automotive and supplier industries. The jury will judge every team’s car and sales plan based on construction, cost planning and sales presentation. The rest of the judging will be done out on the track, where the students demonstrate in a number of performance tests how well their self-built racecars fare in their true environment.”

Overview map of the event

As soon as the Live-Streams are available I will keep you updated…

Source 1: http://www.formulastudent.de

As ususal here’s the schematic overview of the things behind the curtain:

Source: http://www.implementierungsdetail.de/index.php?n=Main.TeamStreaming

Once again FeM is recording and live streaming a Chaos Computer Club event. The Chaos Communication Camp starts today and you can watch everything live:

“The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. The Camp features two conference tracks with interesting lectures, a workshop-track and over 30 villages providing workshops and gettogethers covering a specific topic.”

Chaos Communication Camp 2007
The International Hacker Open Air Gathering
8|9|10|11|12th August 2007
Finowfurt near Berlin, Germany (Old Europe)

“You can participate! Bring your tent and join our villages. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. The 100.000 square meter areal features enough space to camp, cozy places to hang out and a nice pool and lake to swim and do nautic experiments.”

There are two lecture halls called “foo” and “bar”:

Live Stream (WMV) “foo”
Live Stream (WMV) “bar”

Of course like at every CCC event you can grab an up-to-date schedule called “Fahrplan” here. The only thing I did not mention yet is the FeM-Village Wiki page…oh well..done

Source 1: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de
Source 2: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Streams
Source 3: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/
Source 4: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/FeM_Village

Oh well. Just after the 43 thousand Euro pile-of-metal arrived some of our office-technicians just thought: It’s tea time, we got a new toy, would that blend?

So they got the tea set and the digital camera out:

We don’t just think of our new hardware as the core equipment of a enormous network. We think of it… well… in a different way.

Source: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de

FeM is in need of a decent conferencing system for years now. And it seems that there’s something really cool showing up in the next days. As of now Microsoft is going to put it’s Roundtable on sale.

“Microsoft RoundTable is a very cool videoconferencing system featuring 360° panoramic views powered by its 5 built-in cameras.”

“The RoundTable actually installs two USB camera devices. The first is the Active Speaker which uses the RoundTable’s 6 microphones to locate where in the room the active speaker is and then focus one of the 5 cameras onto that person. I suspect it may actually use 2 cameras to focus on a person, since it always appears that the speaker is “centered” which probably would require at least 2 camera images and then the images are “spliced” together, processed, and then transmitted over the USB cable. The second USB camera device is the panoramic camera which combines the 5 camera images into a single panoramic image.”

Source: Roundtable Review

Today I had a talk about IP-TV in our local research network – a project I am involved in the past year. And since I did some of the legal and coding work (YAPS) I was the one who wanted to talk about it the most…

First here’s the slidedeck:

The talk was recorded and you can watch it as soon as the post-production team has finished working on it – I’ll keep you posted.

Source: Slidedeck as PDF

We finally had the time to get to the FIWAK 07. I made these pictures:

Source: FeM Blog

Namenlos wrote about how almost everything is held together at this years ISWI technically. Well he even draw something neat to look at and say “Look, that we did!”

“Die Audiostrecke wird mittels 6 Behringer Ultragain Pro-8 Digital ADA8000 aufgebaut. Diese Geräte nehmen 8 Kanäle Audio via XLR entgegen und setzen die auf eine ADAT-Verbindung über ein TOS-Link-Kabel um. Da die TOS-Links nur 10m weit gehen hängt an jedem Behringer ein ADAT-Extender, der das ganze gleich auf Glasfaser umsetzt. So kommt der Ton vom Studio zur Regie und zurück. Zusätzlich liegen noch 5 Strecken Video (so ein Fernsehsender ganz ohne Bild is ja auch nix.). Zum Abschluss verteilt in der Fischerhütte nochmal ein HP Procurve 2524 ein bischen Netz an die Surfterminals und die Leute vom ebenfalls dort beheimateten L.i.g.h.t. Projekt.”

And then deka came and created another drawing of the Live Streaming infrastructure:

Source: http://blog.slash-me.net/archives/225-ISWISION-2007-hat-begonnen.html

Today ISWI starts for the ISWIsion and ISWIradio team!!

“From June 1st to 10th, a group of approximately 50 students of the university daily presents a TV show about this get-together with all its events and participants. Most of them are members of the student broadcast station called iSTUFF, a department of the Forschungsgemeinschaft elektronische Medien e.V. (FeM e.V.).
The ISWIsion studio is located in the Fischerhütte at Langewiesener Straße 22. The former glass manufactory is being remodeled into our media centre for the traditional ISWI. All shows will be broadcast live and in English via internet stream, campuscable on channel 3 and – for the first time – via DVB-T on channel 23 in the whole city zone of Ilmenau.”

You can get the always up-to-date schedule here.

ISWIsion starts in a few minutes…check it out via live stream!!!

Source 1: http://www.iswiradio.de/
Source 2: http://www.iswision.de/

Today FeM did one important part of the preparations for the ISWIsion TV and radio shows. More in a few days…

the ISWIsion Broadcast Center entrance

There’s something great going to happen this summer. After the great experience we had with the DVB-T TV Station of the Maintech guys at the 23c3 Achim decided that it would be great to have such a DVB-T TV Station for FeM e.V.. He went through the hassle of getting a license and organized the needed hardware. Today one of the important parts arrived… but first a teaser:

Yes! FeM is going to broadcast 24 hours a day from June 2nd to 10th the ISWISION and ISWIradio via DVB-T on channel 23 (490 Mhz). Today the antenna arrived… this thing is humongeous:

Achim wants me to shout out to the partners of this DVB-T FeM e.V. project: Maintech GmbH and SR-Systems. Consider that done.

If you want more information stay tuned on technology-ninja. In the meantime you can read the press feedback:

“Forschungsgemeinschaft elektronischer Medien e. V. veranstaltet erstmals Ereignisfernsehen

Anlässlich der traditionellen Internationalen Studentenwoche Ilmenau 2007 (ISWI 2007) wird die Forschungsgemeinschaft elektronische Medien e. V. vom 1. bis 10. Juni erstmals Ereignisfernsehen veranstalten. Im Stadtgebiet von Ilmenau wird das Programm als DVB-T-Signal (Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting – digitaler Fernsehempfang über Antenne) ausgestrahlt. Zu sehen sein werden Live-Sendungen aus der Fischerhütte in Ilmenau, Übertragungen von Veranstaltungen sowie eine Sendeschleife mit Veranstaltungshinweisen und Wiederholungen. Zusätzlich wird die DVB-T-Frequenz genutzt, um das Programm vom Ilmenauer Studentenfernsehfunk und von Radio hsf zu verbreiten.” (Press release, Thüringer Landesmedienanstalt)

Source 1: http://www.fem-dvb-t.de/index.html
Source 2: http://www.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/index.php?id=69
Source 3: http://www.maintech.de/
Source 4: http://www.sr-systems.de/
Source 5: http://www.tlm.de/tlm/aktuelles_service/presse/index.php?pm_id=272

It seems that tomorrow “Lascif Corpse” going to do a gig in Ilmenau and I want to encourage you to see them live on stage in the BI-Club(admission is 2€ reduced /4€ full).

If you cannot drop by you also can tune into the live stream the FeM Streaming Team is going to send out over the intertubes. Yes that’s right: the complete concert is available through a live stream.

Tune into the live stream around 2200 CEST and watch a great concert…

Until that go to their mySpace site and listen to some songs…

Source 1: http://www.lascif-corpse.de/
Source 2: http://bi-club.de/
Source 3: http://www.myspace.com/lascifcorpse
Source 4: mms://streaming-internet.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/bi-club

I was forced to do other things yesterday evening when my friends of FeM e.V. decided to take out their big-ass tv and play a some WiiSports on a house…

Of course that little game had a purpose: They wanted to test if the Sanyo projector is bright enough for the upcoming drive-in cinema season…

You can read more (in german however) on the official FeM blog.

Source 1: big-ass tv
Source 2: official blog

The trailer for this years FIWAK is done:

FeM e.V. – which translates into “Forschungsgemeinschaft elektronische Medien e.V.” which then translates into “research community for electronic media” – is now officially 10 years old. Happy Birthday!

And to celebrate this birthday there will be some great events:

25.04., 2100h: iSTUFF – FeM Geburtstagssendung (Public Viewing im BC-Club – entrance free!!!)

26.04., 2100h: hfc Sondervorführung – “12 Monkeys” (Helmholtz-Hörsaal – entrance free!!!)

28.04., entrance 1930h – starts 2000h: Spezial Chillout Lounge (Mensa der TU Ilmenau – entrance free!!!)

Source: FeM e.V. blog

Hurray! We got three brand new Canon XHA1 camcorder

Source: Canon

I wrote quite a lot of code for the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress. And because of that I want to make it publicy available for everyone to download and use. It’s all GPL (because of the libaries used) so use it according to the license.

You can learn how to:

• deserialize the pentabarf schedule.en.xml file
• create a valid congress filename
• create and manipulate animations with text and bitmaps
• store those animations in AVI container files

Download: CodeOnCongress.zip

The planning process started way earlier than last year but as usual some things remain until the very last minute before everything starts. But since this year the teamwork and enthusiasm was extraordinary we finally made it almost as planned. We surely did not reach our goal of releasing the recordings hours after the talk ended. Mainly because we underestimated the amount of knowledge and pain it took to actually get the recordings running on the iPod. It was one of the guidelines for this years official recordings: they had to run on current generation video iPods and they had to have all the metatags. So the team did it and we ended up releasing the first half (nearly) of the 23c3 recordings into the public only 2 weeks instead of the 4-6 months of last year. Even better: we managed to improve the video quality and even got smaller files. That wouldn’t been possible without the encoding-pipeline knowledge that Michael Feiri brought into the team. With that knowledge it also took several days to actually build the working pipeline.(yes the iPod is one special piece of hardware) The complete encoding-pipeline we used will be documented and released soon.

So after all that planning we finally packed our stuff and hit the road:

After some hours and the unpacking the video studio looked like this:

here’s a close up of the Windows Media Encoders, the h.264 encoding machine and the storage (all from behind):

So we surely brought enough processing power to berlin. And this is what did take the picture:

BTW: the black machine in the background just
died during the keynote speech…

Want to see what it’s like watching “out of the window” of the video studio? No problem:

or how about another view of the studio:

So. So you had some pictures of the video studio and the setup. But I bet you want to know some more details about the setup itself. I created an overview for you:

Since last years setup was completely digital (planned) and we ended up using the DV-tape backup since all the recordings were screwed up we thought it might be a good idea to go back one step and use analog video as in FBAS to transport and record the talks. We also had the DV-tape backup this year and to be honest in some cases we have to fall back to that. Less than 10 out of 130 recordings are screwed up so we have to use the DV backup. That means 120 of them worked out as planned. Great! We are currently cutting and encoding them and as you read this more than half of them should be up on the official servers and the mirrors.

Now in the aftermath of the congress we learned a new lesson: there’s maybe one or another speaker that would not allow us releasing their talk recording. In the future we think of having something like a “don’t record me”-list to avoid misunderstandings.

It’s done.

The first 53 recordings of the 23c3 are currently uploaded to the server. The remaining ones will be available in the next few days.

You have the following choices:

ftp: ftp://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/23C3/video/

www: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/23C3/video/

rsync: rsync://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/23C3

Because of that major hardware fault on the first day of 23c3 I was not able to blog about the things that happened at the congress. I am going to catch up on everything soon.

In the meantime take this information: The recordings are made. The majority of the recordings is working as planned and is going to be encoded and released in the next hours/days. There are some lectures where something went wrong, but since we had a great backup strategy nothing is lost and will be put online later.

One question came up frequently: What format and codec will the final official recordings have?

Here is the answer:

Video: h.264, 640×480, x264-Parameter: –no-cabac –level=30 –subme=7 –me=umh –crf=23 –ref=2 –partitions=all –mixed-refs

Audio: AAC, (using neroaac)

The machines are currently encoding and muxing the recordings. So stay tuned to get your hands on the high-quality official recordings soon.

BTW: Thanks to Michael Feiri for his in depth knowledge about the whole encoding process and tools that are used and his help with all the hassle around it.