Live Streaming and Recording of Events

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Aren Siekmeier

Looks good. I've posted some of what we're working on at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=62. We haven't yet tested the setup with the new, much cheaper equipment, but plan to do so at the Minnesota State Championship in 3 weeks. If the quality turns out, we're excited that we might be able to bring the equipment down to <$50.

We had not tried any of the replay stuff you mentioned in the writeup, so we'll have to check that out. It'd be interesting to hear from 2337 and 1678 as well about overlays, camera quality, streaming hosts, etc.

How did this camera and setup work out for you guys? I am looking into putting together some higher quality streams for St. Louis going forward and this is a great price point. I went ahead and purchased the camera just to play around with it and see what we could do.

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

How did this camera and setup work out for you guys? I am looking into putting together some higher quality streams for St. Louis going forward and this is a great price point. I went ahead and purchased the camera just to play around with it and see what we could do.

I've been out of the country for most of our events, but I'll send some of our webcast people over here.

[bvisness]

I don't think we ever used the cheap camera for an actual broadcast. We're using the GoPro again this year because we wanted to use that widescreen webcam on our robot instead.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by bvisness

I don't think we ever used the cheap camera for an actual broadcast. We're using the GoPro again this year because we wanted to use that widescreen webcam on our robot instead.

I received it yesterday and it does seem perfect for on-board robot use. The field of view is pretty great for a cheap webcam but the video quality was somewhat 'grainy' and had some noise. I suppose you get what you pay for and the GoPro is still a great inexpensive solution compared to some of the high end A/V solutions out there.

[Patrick Flynn]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

A lot has been talked about recently about the ability to live stream and record events. This has been something a lot of groups have been looking into.

Spectrum has been working on a paper on how we set it up at the Lone Star regional this year, but I know there are different ways of doing it at different events.

Here is the current draft of the paper . It still needs a lot of work before the paper is polished but I think the system is pretty good for the cost. We spent a little over $500 total on our setup excluding the laptop (we just used my personal laptop). The original setup was conceived by Clinton Bolinger and the EngiNERDs and they use a system similar to this to do many of the MSC recordings and streams. At Lone Star we had a very poor audio input and we were also streaming over a 4G modem because there wasn't a very good internet connection at the event.

Allen I love the paper so far, A question I assume this currently requires someone to be sitting at the streaming table hitting start stop at the end of each match to split the match footage? It there anyway to automate this and not require an addition person at the event?

Secondly a more general question is there someone at FIRST that we can get in touch with and work with to get a universal set up?

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Patrick Flynn

Allen I love the paper so far, A question I assume this currently requires someone to be sitting at the streaming table hitting start stop at the end of each match to split the match footage? It there anyway to automate this and not require an addition person at the event?

Secondly a more general question is there someone at FIRST that we can get in touch with and work with to get a universal set up?

It does require a person, but I don't really see this a problem. Literally anyone can do this plus they get a pretty good view of the matches. I had two students switching out during the event and it was never an issue. If you want to do some of the nicer things, like instant match uploads or match replays you will need a person anyway. We also had alliance selection results to the side of the screen and were able to quickly make gone to lunch or other graphics as needed. All of this needs to have a person working the laptop.

I'm sure there is someone to talk to, but I'm not sure who. I know Clinton and I have both spoken to Frank about it, not really sure what the progress is.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

A lot has been talked about recently about the ability to live stream and record events. This has been something a lot of groups have been looking into.

Spectrum has been working on a paper on how we set it up at the Lone Star regional this year, but I know there are different ways of doing it at different events.

Citrus Circuits also plans on having a whitepaper out on the streaming system we used at Inland Empire and Sacramento. Also look for further developments in Northern California.

[silverD]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

Spectrum has been working on a paper on how we set it up at the Lone Star regional this year, but I know there are different ways of doing it at different events.

Here is the current draft of the paper .

Thanks for posting this Allen. It has been very helpful as we prepare to stream the 10,000 Lakes Regional for the first time. Here are a few thoughts I'd like to share:
- The HD Hero 2 is a mini HDMI port where as the newer GoPro models are micro HDMI. We bought this skeleton case for our Hero 2 and made a cutout for the HDMI and SD card slots.
- Much like the Elgato, the AVerMedia LGP C875 is a USB capture device, but it also has a driver that allows it to be DirectShow compatible allowing it to be used with a greater variety of software.
- Like Andrew suggested, we purchased a speaker stand that we were easily able to slide an extendable painter's pole into.

Thanks for everyone's input in this thread. It has been very informative.
Nate

[Ryan Dognaux]

One question I have is how are you guys getting the high resolution real time scoring overlay? I thought the Scorpion box could only output a composite video source, but streams like PNW have really sharp real time scoring info - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWduHPHCZjk

[Metonym]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

One question I have is how are you guys getting the high resolution real time scoring overlay? I thought the Scorpion box could only output a composite video source, but streams like PNW have really sharp real time scoring info - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWduHPHCZjk

The FMS case outputs DVI, at least on the PNW fields. This is then converted and split into an HDMI signal that we overlay on our stream and show on the FTA's desk.

Originally Posted by RoboTigers1796

We were banned from Twitch while streaming the NYC Regional. Not for music copyright though, for "nongaming content". We were displeased to say the least and have still yet to receive a response from Twitch on the matter.

Twitch is a gaming focused streaming site. They have the right to take down any stream that doesn't fit with the style of content they want on their site. I agree that it is frustrating, but you just have to accept that fact.

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by Metonym

Twitch is a gaming focused streaming site. They have the right to take down any stream that doesn't fit with the style of content they want on their site. I agree that it is frustrating, but you just have to accept that fact.

The only thing is, Twitch has "FRC: Recycle Rush" as an option in their "what game are you playing" menu when you setup the stream, so unless those categories are submitted by the community and not reviewed by anyone, Twitch should be ok with FIRST competitions being streamed.

The real problem is that the "non-gaming content" flags are submitted by users, not twitch admins, if you get enough flags you get banned automatically for 24 hours and the appeal system is too slow to be of any use.


Our first event this year was streaming to Twitch and got banned in the middle of Friday competitions. We switched over to Hitbox.tv (basically a twitch clone with fewer restrictions) and had no issues aside from having to refresh the stream every few hours due to length limitations.

[Deetman]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

One question I have is how are you guys getting the high resolution real time scoring overlay? I thought the Scorpion box could only output a composite video source, but streams like PNW have really sharp real time scoring info - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWduHPHCZjk

All the District scorpion cases do not have a scan converter in them so FIRST gave us an option of what video output we wanted. I think all the districts opted for DVI as you can get DVI, VGA, and HDMI from the DVI-I output.

For MAR, we've done it two ways since the audience screen is limited to 1280x720 resolution.
1) 720p: 15ft DVI to HDMI cable straight into our video switch equipment.
2) 1080p: DVI -> VGA adapter into VGA->HDMI scan converter which scales the resolution up to 1080p then via HDMI into our video switch.

Obviously what you can connect to is out of your control, but on the standard scorpion case you could connect to the VGA pass through which will output the audience screen as if it was on another computer monitor. From that you could scale that to whatever resolution you wanted. This is what we were going to do in MAR before we found out this year that we were getting a DVI output.

[sanddrag]

Although I didn't see it, people who were watching Ventura told me it was very good. Anyone have the specifics for that event?