Regionals Not Archived
 

There are many teams that may have hosted regional webcasts and first off they need to be thanked over and over for there time and effort. Yet, it would be very nice if some were to be archived for teams to watch.. I dont want this to sound to demanding, but some teams memebers would like see some video. Some regionals that come to mind...

• Great Lakes Regional
  Detroit Regional
  Midwest Regional
  Pittsburg Regional
  Greater Toronto Regional

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

Midwest is on TBA (and soap, I think).

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

Myt fault i meant to say West Michigan REgional

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

You can see the GTR regional at http://www.discoverychannel.ca/shows....aspx?sid=7826. It will not be on a publically available archive though because since Discovery holds the copyright on it, we can't redistribute it.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

yeah, i'm kinda wondering about the Seattle regional, Portland, Silicon Valley... idk seems like alot of regionals are missing and/or not up... and it's less than a week before Champs!

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I agree on the thanking for webcasts! Parents from our team did all the work to get Hawaii webcasted...Hours and hours of work! MAHALO MARSHALLS! As long as we're putting requests in however, I'd love to see SVR up somewhere too. I don't see it on the NASA archive even though they handled the webcast. Anybody know anything about it??

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You need to look more closely... They've got pictures too!

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I've done what I thought I should for WMR. If you really want to hear some of the worst audio ever for announcers, I can get the first 50 qualifying matchers together. The matches for Finals got corrupted, so I can't do anything for those. I thought that everyone would be much better off waiting until Mike got to them, and no one has bothered to correct me on that assumption.

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If anybody has any Bayou or Lone Star footage, it would be greatly appreciated!

Pavan.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I'm sorry to say it, but you do sound demanding... recording a regional and getting up on TBA and SOAP is a very labour intensive process. It takes someone setting up the recording equipment, checking the recording every so often to make sure things are working. Then once the footage has been recorded many times it has to be brought into the computer and then the parsing of the video takes at least 6 hours of work itself. Then it needs to be uploaded to the FTP servers, and on TBA's end more work needs to be done to convert it again and organize it. So before you go complaining about some regionals not being recorded take a look here, and the TBA forum and see the hard work thats going on behind the scene to get all the video recorded and up for your viewing pleasure, and hey feel free to join in and help out! There is footage out there that still needs to be parsed and split up.

Sorry if I sound slightly annoyed, but you have to understand that getting all this video footage takes a lot of man hours which many people have worked on. We have improved greatly over last year in getting regional footage into a central hub, there are improvements that will be made for next year to make this all easier for people to do. Just to let you know webcasting and recording are usually done totally separately, these jobs usually need to be split up and thats possibly why some regionals had webcasts but not archives.

P.S. GTR will be up eventually, not until after Atlanta though

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I hate to sound needy, especially after that post, but I'm looking for connecticut footage, too. I know it was being cast, though I don't know if the feed was reliable.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

We managed to post the elimination matches for the Portland Regional to TBA. For most of the qualifications, we got very minimal (if any) audio. I know 488 was also recording the regional there and I wouldn't be surprised if they also recorded the Seattle Regional.

We also have the Hawaii Regional recorded, but there's just a lot of time necessary to get them prepped and sent to TBA.

If you're looking to have all of these videos before Championships on Thursday, you're probably out of luck. For us, it's just one student who is willing to spend the hours upon hours to get it all prepped. I'm sure it's that way with most of the other regionals as well. Given some time, many of them will eventually get posted - just not on the 'gotta have it now' timeframe we've come to expect in this society.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

We've got pretty much the entire Hawaii regionals archived in windows media format. Windows media player is not the preferred format for TBA. :(

I haven't had a chance to send the archives to the NASA folks to have it converted. I have time tomorrow morning to try to track down my NASA contacts and/or TBA to see about getting the archives up.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

Any idea on the whereabouts of Chesapeake? It could not be webcasted and I don't know if it was recorded. I really don't care about audio as long as there's video footage that I can put up on a website. Thanks. :)

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I'll piggyback off of Jonathan's Post... I uploaded the video for Davis last year to Soap, only to see it gone a month later. While recording the video was not a problem, PARSING it took me (an old techie) about 10 hours of work.

I would have done it again this year for Davis - but the computer I had setup for it crashed the day before and I just didn't have time to fix it up.

I think it would be much more doable if there existed a way to just upload the entire video and one of you programming guru's write a script to parse it. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Ok, now go ahead and tell me how impossible that is....

Also if you are complaining that there isn't an archive for a webcast, then GET A RECORDER (also discussed in other threads) and record it yourself. I recorded SVR on my computer - it's not as high quality as a direct link at the arena - but still good enough to use and learn from.

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Preferred, maybe not, acceptable, absolutely. Check your PMs.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

for future years, you guys just need a peice of TBA-compatible software which sits at one of the hubs at each regional. this application simply listens to the signals from mission control (or whoever starts/stops the matches) and uses that data to record and encode the movie. files are saved based on match data from mission control.


its kinda forward, and maybe a little complex logistic-wise, but if it could be done then the organization would be increased, and man-hours and waiting time would be decreased.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

Not sure FIRST would like this any more than they liked Sundial........

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

This idea has been thought of before and discussed with FIRST. There is no simple way to trigger the recording unless you receive a direct signal from the field computer. This is not a simple task and requires software modifications on the field computer, as well as a good amount of scripting on the recording side. There are current attempts being made to get this working and hopefully there will be more details later on...

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I don't think the video capture side of it would be too difficult. Set up a Directshow video capture graph that spits the data to a file. As for the field communication part, that might be more difficult. Setting up the graph would probably an hour or two of work to research the filters you'd need.

When you get contacted by the field computer (or the user pushes a button to say that the match has started)
IMediaControl* pifController = NULL;
m_pifGraph->QueryInterface(IID_IMediaControl,(void**)&pifCont roller) // gets the media control pointer from the main graph
pifController->Play(); // starts the graph running
pifController->Release(); // releases our COM reference
// yay! now the graph is playing and saving to a file!

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

Error. Is this the link that can only be viewed if you are in Canada?
If not, then the link is now bad.


Can you just base it off of a sound input? The match start sound for example? I know this a question coming from a non-programmer like me, but how hard would it be to set up something to record and be started somehow by the match start & end sounds??

Then again, someone can just sit there at the feed box at the regional and start and stop recording manually as well.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

It should be viewable. Search for the GTR archive thread, maybe I fail at copy/pasting. Discovery had the geo-lock off for the regional itself, I would assume they'd have it off for these as well.

That might work, but you'd have to train it to recognize sounds, and that (might be) a tall order. You could assume sounds follow the match start -> autonomous end -> teleop start -> end of match order and just change states as you detect loudness coming out of the field input without bothering to recognize each sound, but then that wouldn't account for them testing the field or having field errors. Having someone sit there would probably work best.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I was able to view the videos in California.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

This is possible now, but there are still dozens of unarchived regionals.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

Thats why the 'archiving team' needs a bit more collaboration, communication, and fallback.
What you guys do is amazing, and im guessing a couple tiny improvements will bring you from 25% to 100% easily.

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The problem with setting up a "drop in" solution (Believe me, this is not a new idea..) is differences in hardware between users. There's no guarantee that different video capture devices and their drivers will be compatible with recording software packages.

We have looked into DirectShow pumping video into VLC, which seems like a decent solution. (This is how we recorded the Boston regional). You can set the video recording settings once, then press play and stop to stop and start recording. I haven't looked into the VLC documentation enough though, but if it has OLE-esque controls it may be a feasible implementation.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

We have Portland and Seattle archived, but the files are very large -- into the dozens of gigabytes each -- and we haven't had time to get someone to sit down and encode them into a more manageable format. Someday soon, perhaps.

Sorry, everyone.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

You shouldn't need to pump it into VLC. It is possible to set up a filter graph so it goes:
Capture Source -> Compressor -> File

You can have the user select their capture source and codec at run-time (thus diminishing problems with hardware compatibility), and you could distribute some directshow compatible codec (preferably one that allows for quick seeking) with the software package to ensure uniformity of output files.

Granted, all this would require a custom app, but even that isn't that hard to create. I worked with directshow for 4 months my previous co-op term, it's really a nice technology.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I started poking at building a custom app, but ran into roadblocks trying to find out information about how to do this in Windows or, preferably, something cross platform.

If there is interest among the community, do you think some people would want to band together to create a FIRST Robotics Video Archiving Application? If we want to get really fancy, we can even have it push video up to the Internet as matches happen, so archiving is "5 minutes behind live."

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

As mentioned earlier the most difficult aspect of creating an application to record the matches automatically is the different hardware configurations. The only way to really solve this is to have the recording equipment come with every field (I believe there are about 9??). For that we would need either convince FIRST that a computer with the necessary video capture card, and adequate performance is a good investment. Or some how get a specific sponsor to donate the equipment for all the field setups.

On top of that it would crate a new volunteer position, and the person running the recording would need to be very adept in using computers and solving problems that arise... (I can tell you as much as you plan these things out, capturing video with a computer isn't always a reliable system... computers like to crash). So doing all this isn't as easy as it sounds, but if the community creates a application to automatically record, split, encode, and upload all the matches we would have a strong case to bring to FIRST to get a system like this installed for every field setup.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I'd prefer a continuous recording solution, but that requires at least a dual-core and a good amount of RAM if you want to include splitting.

The best options, to me, are splitting based on sound (think: Voice recognition with two words, split 5-10 seconds before the start word, and after the end word. I doubt the computer really cares if the sound is an english word or not unless it is in dictation mode. Knowledge of the Microsoft Speech API required), or split based on user input (I'd want the computer to take a range to split in, and let me go back and find the exact frame to split before or after it finishes recording).

My only problems stemmed from user error, and the fact that it somehow got turned off early. I'm attributing both to human error, probably all mine.
I guess my vote is that computers are inconsistently inconsistent.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I think it would be easier to split by looking at the frames, similar to how MythTV does commercial flagging. The ball randomizer screen is the start flag, the Final Score screen is the end flag. Or it could just look for the Realtime scoring bar on the bottom of the screen and flag all that content (which would include final scores.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

About Chesapeake:
I was able to record it using QuickTime Broadcaster (h.264) (pretty poor audio / no audio some days) and am currently working on parsing it. It is pretty slow going because I've got lots of work at school. It should be finished a few weeks after the Championship.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I think FIRST just handed everyone the solution because I remember hearing yesterday that the fancy new controller can do image recognition.

Robots recording Robots? ;)

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The Finger Lakes FRC regional is still under the process of being archived, Elim. Matches and Saturdays Awards should be up at least by the end of May.

Me = College Student with work to do :P

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

The first 20 Matches from westmichigan are currently uploading to firstvideoarchive right now (I will upload to soap unless soap's ftp info changed). I have had to work at work more and longer hours lately than expected. Most of the video splitting has been happening at 11pm each night for a while and each takes 15 minutes or so.

-Mike AA

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

SOAP's FTP is the same for now, you may want to contact someone from SOAP to let them know you are putting it up there though because of the server transition that is going on.

Also, if you would like any help with the parsing, feel free to upload a chunk of the video somewhere and PM me. I have pretty good speeds in both directions here at the University and I usually have a bit of free time.

If anyone else has video that they want help parsing feel free to PM me.

Re: Regionals Not Archived
 

I will rip the other DVDs and put onto the server for you tomorrow evening.

-MIke