In the meantime, to promote all these things that we're producing, and the stories that we're telling, we're making stuff!
I have a gameboy game that follows the plot of Expedition Sasquatch. I'm making cartridges right now! We'll have them available in a few more weeks.
I'm working on more gameboy games for our other shows. We'll do a Shouting into the Void game. We'll do a Jupiter's Ghost game.
We make toys out of recycled milk jugs, and we're working on new action figures for the characters from several of our programs.
We're also making new cartoons! Better cartoons!
We're making new posters, t-shirts, and zines. We'll probably even do some comics. It'll all start hitting the airwaves between now and the end of time.
When those are ready, I'll talk about them a lot here. We'll be selling them to raise money for the rest of what we're doing. If that sounds like something you'd be to, stick around.
Broadcast Testing today went okay! It could have gone better, but we encountered the inevitable issue that projects like this always encounter. (Timing signals!)
I'll explain in more detail in a bit, and talk about why that's funny too, but before that I'll talk about what it means.
Basically, the cable company wants to see us broadcasting stable for 24 hours before they let the network go on the air.
Unfortunately, 24 hours from now is the end of the day on Friday, and they *also* want to monitor the channel for the first 24 hours it's on the air to verify that it's stable.
Every time pro's work with amateur gear, they complain about the clocks.
It's the biggest difference between professional gear and amateur gear.
When the videofreex tried to do a TV broadcast in 1970, it was the first problem the TV exec's encountered.
The freex knew how to fix it, but weren't allowed to touch the gear because they were not a member of the right union (and they were barred from joining the union because they didn't use the right kind of equipment.)
So it took three or four years before any television network successfully broadcast any video shot in a home video format.
"When the content just changed, the transcode on our transcoder stalled. This happened several times. I have to go in and re-submit it. We will need to try and figure out what is causing it. "
which is a phrase that comes with *several* red flags, but...
I mean, even discounting the things he said that I would have preferred him to say differently, and the fact that the decoder can't automatically re-start when the stream fails (which is a huge problem!) I just have no idea how to research this one.
Alright, I got a little more info out of the cable company, but not much.
And they've gone home for the evening, so I will not be able to continue troubleshooting until tomorrow.
But I was able to identify an error message in the ffmpeg debug logs that seems to correspond with the timing of their issue, and I was able to make that error message go away.
I was never able to reproduce the issue, which makes troubleshooting exceptionally difficult.
If you've ever wondered if it's possible to run a broadcast television network on commodity hardware using open source software when you have no idea what you're doing, the answer is absolutely yes.
We're doing it right now! Or, at least, we will be tomorrow when they plug us in to the head-end.
We're running ffplayout on the server side, building our schedules by hand (new open source scheduler and media asset manager coming Soon ™️) and outputting to SRT and RTMP.
The RTMP stream is consumed by peertube, and then spit back out to our roku channel.
The SRT stream is consumed by a piece of hardware at the cable company (that we paid for, an Impulse 300D Network Decoder)which takes the SRT stream and just shoves it in to their head end.
The Impulse Decoder is the only piece of equipment in all of this that isn't a cheap rented VPS, and whatever it's running is the only time any of these videos touch something that isn't free software.
The vast majority of our videos are captured on second hand 10+ year old cameras.
There are a few newer cameras in the mix, but they're significantly less common and frankly less useful.
We take the footage from those 10 year old cameras and we catalog it in nextcloud and it syncs to everyone who is involved in production.
Then we edit in kdenlive.
Audio is recorded, as needed, in ardor or audacity, and edited in the same place (or it's recorded on purpose built hardware rescued from the digital landfill and edited in ardor, audacity, or directly in kdenlive.)
Most of our editing is also done on second hand/landfill rescue computers. Most of our programming is edited and rendered at 720p or lower because that makes it cheaper and easier to work with on old hardware.
Everything lives on servers running debian (often configured with yunohost, because I'm lazy and I shouldn't have to maintain my own software.)
The vast majority of our content gets licensed CC-BY-SA so that other people can benefit from what we've done, and are encouraged to give back to the community.
And so, #NewEllijayTelevision is a full fledged cable network (or, at least, it will be in ~14 hours), web streaming network, and video on demand platform, powered by open source software, running on upcycled hardware, produced by a ragtag group of weirdos in the north GA mountains.
Trying to reshape the future of television.I write and build stuff. Est. 1990. (He, Him, Etc.)http://andrewroach.netOriginal posts CC-BY-SA 4.0 - Share them, but link to the original.