Every year there is a struggle to archive video of all of the matches, and it seems we haven't been keeping up with the growth of regionals. In response to this, I wanted to toss out this idea for consideration:
What if we (as the FRC community interested in seeing every match archived) built a set of boxes to automatically record video? They could consist of an old-ish laptop with a cheap USB video dongle, and some software to parse the incoming video stream in real time. My thought is that these would be plugged into the network and video feeds, and then any configuration work could be done remotely by one or two people.
There have been several attempts at automatic match parsing, so I suspect this is nearly a solved problem. Uploading the video to YouTube should be straightforward with their API. With a little work, we could link videos to TBA in real time.
I don't know if we could get FIRST to ship these with the fields, but if we made them small and self contained, there might be a chance. Even if that isn't a possibility, it should be possible to ship the hardware around relatively inexpensively.
The hard part is still having someone on site to plug the box in and make sure it's connected, but maybe this would lower the barrier enough that we could get all of the regionals recorded?
Questions for discussion:
- Would this help us archive more regionals, or is this solving the wrong problem?
- Would you plug in a box at your regional?
- Would you help develop software for the box?
- Would you sponsor/purchase a box?
- Suggestions for hardware or software we could work with?