2007-11-15, 09:08
I thought I'd share this with you guys, maybe you'd get a kick out of it.
I'm the video tech for the anime convention 'AC Cubed' in Ottawa, Canada. The other weekend (Nov 2nd-4th) we deployed a system in which video content captured live from our main events room was broadcast around the convention center to remote TVs on a local area network. The Video over IP boxes we used to recive the video? Yup, Xbox's with Xbox Media Center.
In our case, we used three routers, one as an AP the other two as bridges at either end of the Atrium, to make a semi-wireless network where the shorter lengths were gapped using eithernet from the bridges. Yeah, it's a shame that the Xbox wifi adaptor costs about as much as a used Xbox. :/
The machines did quite well for what they cost and overall my fellow staff were impressed with the performance. A 10lb box with RF, composite, S-video, component or even SCART (Not like we'd need SCART in Canada) support just by swapping out an adaptor. Eithernet. Purpose built TV support. It's great.
We had four modified Xbox's set up around the convention wired into our network, one on a composite connection, two on S-video, and in our cafe we even had one rigged to a 32" HDTV with the component cables.
There were networking issues, where the radio signal bounced around the metal structure more than we hoped, as a result our G network was only capable of supporting 4-5 1mbps MPEG-2 streams, we had initially hoped for 3mbps. But oh well.
All our video fed into a server in the back of our main events room, where there was a video mixer which then fed into a PVR-350 card installed in an Athlon XP. VideoLAN was used to stream video from the card, add overlays, a clock, marquee, and scrolling on screen updates via RSS scripts. The resulting output was fairly professional looking, granted, it was VLC that did the grunt work there.
The only issue we had with the Xbox's was that we found out that if a playlist item set to loop in XBMC fails enough times, it will give up and just show on screen that there were too many errornious playlist items and just sit there. I hope there is some means to change that value to infinate. This normally occured during the first-field-test problems we had, and the server they were connecting to was offline as we went 'Awww fuck!'.
A few other anime conventions who had staff present are now interested in how this system was done, and we expect to employ the Xbox for at least a few years in the future. Especially as the box's will continue to get cheaper and they can do 8mbit 720p MPEG-2 streams in lab tests. (Is it reasonable to call my basement a 'lab'?)
I'm the video tech for the anime convention 'AC Cubed' in Ottawa, Canada. The other weekend (Nov 2nd-4th) we deployed a system in which video content captured live from our main events room was broadcast around the convention center to remote TVs on a local area network. The Video over IP boxes we used to recive the video? Yup, Xbox's with Xbox Media Center.
In our case, we used three routers, one as an AP the other two as bridges at either end of the Atrium, to make a semi-wireless network where the shorter lengths were gapped using eithernet from the bridges. Yeah, it's a shame that the Xbox wifi adaptor costs about as much as a used Xbox. :/
The machines did quite well for what they cost and overall my fellow staff were impressed with the performance. A 10lb box with RF, composite, S-video, component or even SCART (Not like we'd need SCART in Canada) support just by swapping out an adaptor. Eithernet. Purpose built TV support. It's great.
We had four modified Xbox's set up around the convention wired into our network, one on a composite connection, two on S-video, and in our cafe we even had one rigged to a 32" HDTV with the component cables.
There were networking issues, where the radio signal bounced around the metal structure more than we hoped, as a result our G network was only capable of supporting 4-5 1mbps MPEG-2 streams, we had initially hoped for 3mbps. But oh well.
All our video fed into a server in the back of our main events room, where there was a video mixer which then fed into a PVR-350 card installed in an Athlon XP. VideoLAN was used to stream video from the card, add overlays, a clock, marquee, and scrolling on screen updates via RSS scripts. The resulting output was fairly professional looking, granted, it was VLC that did the grunt work there.
The only issue we had with the Xbox's was that we found out that if a playlist item set to loop in XBMC fails enough times, it will give up and just show on screen that there were too many errornious playlist items and just sit there. I hope there is some means to change that value to infinate. This normally occured during the first-field-test problems we had, and the server they were connecting to was offline as we went 'Awww fuck!'.
A few other anime conventions who had staff present are now interested in how this system was done, and we expect to employ the Xbox for at least a few years in the future. Especially as the box's will continue to get cheaper and they can do 8mbit 720p MPEG-2 streams in lab tests. (Is it reasonable to call my basement a 'lab'?)