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

Source: FeM Blog

We spent the last two days in Duisburg attending the Student Technology Conference 2007.

“From Software Architecture, User Interface and Robotics to Games Development with the XNA framework: in use and brand new technologies of the IT – industry will be presented and demonstrated at technologically advanced level. Microsofts Student Technology Conference is the perfect opportunity to engage with potential employers and to get in touch with Microsofts .NET technology. Additionally the German Finals in Microsofts premiere technology competition, the Imagine Cup 2007, will have its final in the Software Design invitational right here!”

the keynote

view from our hotel room…nice, eh?

Source: http://www.studentconference.de

The trailer for this years FIWAK is done:

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

Und wie versprochen gibt es hier nun die Slides des .NET Compact Framework Vortrags (Version 1.0 und 2.0)

Download hier.

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.

Heute um 18 Uhr findet das zweite .NET Usergroup Treffen in Ilmenau (Campus, Haus F, Rechnerlabor) statt.

Agenda:

1. Begrüßung, Neuigkeiten bzgl. der Usergroup (Nico Orschel, Microsoft Student Partner)
2. .NET Compact Framework (Daniel Kirstenpfad, Microsoft Senior Student Partner)
3. Mobiles Web mit ASP.NET 2.0 (Nico Orschel, Microsoft Student Partner)
4. Networking und gemütlicher Ausklang des Treffens

Die Teilnahme am Treffen ist kostenlos, unverbindlich und nicht anmeldepflichtig.

Das ganze kann man auch nochmal auf www.dotnetcommunity.de nachlesen. Dort und hier wird es dann auch nach der Veranstaltung die Slides geben.

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.

FeM e.V. is officially taking the last steps of the “journey to 23c3″. Expect us to arrive in Berlin about 1300.

Stay tuned for more pictures and text about the 23c3 streaming and recording setup/team/…

One more step forward: The 23c3 opening credit generator is done. It’s an application which reads the Fahrplan XML file and generates an opening credit movie file which we will use in the recording and encoding process.

And this is what it finally looks like:

After clicking the “generate” button it’ll create the animation on the fly with all the blending and font rendering and write it to a movie file in it’s own directory. I used the AForge which is GPL v2 which makes the whole thingy GNU v2. Damn, I hate this license crap B-)

Sourcecode: Vorspanngenerator_sourcecode.zip (2,17 MB)

“CONGRATULATIONS! Your group (DotNet Community Thüringen) has been approved to be an INETA member based on your dedication to the .NET user group community.”

Yesterday the first usergroup meeting took place in the computer pool of the faculty of mechanical engineering. Sven and Nico had their lectures for which you can get the slides as soon as possible on the website of the usergroup.

Update:

Windows Presentation Foundation (Sven Hubert)

AJAX with ASP.NET (Nico Orschel)

Source: http://www.dotnetcommunity.de

ATTENTION: The information in this article are not final and are subject to be changed during the plannings.

In less than 2 months the 23c3 takes place in Berlin/Germany (December 27.-30th 2006). And the plannings are in full progress. We had several brainstorm sessions and I think that we finally do have a plan. First of all: We learned a lot from the 22c3 live streaming and recording work. And to give you an overview of the things we want to achieve this time:

1. permanent working live streams of all 4 lecture halls
2. high quality recordings without using our DV-Tape fallback
3. making low/mid/high quality recordings in different codecs available for download within 24 hours

To achieve these goals we’re going to need considerably more hardware than last year, which means:

• 4 WMV Live Encoding machines
• 1 MPEG-2 encoding machine with 4 MPEG-2 encoder cards
• 4 video editing machines
• 6 19″ TFTs + 1 4
• at least 1 monitoring machine
• more than 1 Tbyte of storage space
• 5 cameras + 1 video mixer
• a lot of helping hands (yes, we need help chaos angels!!)

So. The camera setup is almost identical to the last one. But this time we want to use a better FBAS signal instead of the in-house HF-cable-TV. The WMV encoding stays as it was last year. We plan to install an additional MPEG-2 hardware encoding machine which produces high-quality MPEG-2 data (which gets edited and compressed for download distribution as fast as possible).

Since we’re sill in planning stage we cannot speak about bitrates, live streams and such. Everything is subject to change, it’s just a draft. But stay tuned and read frequently. Oh… and comments are welcome.

Source 1: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Home
Source 2: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Angel_FAQ

Once again it’s workshop time. You can read about the activities in their (german) blog.

Source:

It starts fairly early this year: even FeM is already preparing and planning for this years live streaming and recording. The public wiki of 23c3 is online and even the Call for Participation screams: visit me!

So, remember: beside the official wiki pages, you can always come and check here for information about FeM activities on 23c3…(streaming, recording,…)

Source: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/cfp/

Source: FeM 23c3 recording and streaming project (no website, no link)

…to Hamburg.

See you there.

We had a great campfire and I played again with my Powershot… here is the High Dynamic Range campfire:

After last years FIWAK, FeM is back in the forest. This year with even more hardware, even more people and even more tents.

The first lecture starts in just a few minutes so stay tuned for more news on the FIWAK 06.

Source: FeM FIWAK Homepage

Tomorrow the US TechEd takes off. If you cannot attend personally you can attend it virtually. Microsoft hosts a website called “Virtual TechEd” where you can watch talks and keynotes via streaming video. Beside watching the talks you can listen to the TechEd radio livestream.

Source 1: http://virtualteched.com/
Source 2: TechEd radio livestream

And those noisy crowd watched it…

LIMES! A huge amount of them. Yummi.

Thanks Dominik

Munich.

I am on the road now