blog/data/2013-03-03-frikanalen.txt

   1 Title: Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web
   2 Tags: english, video, nuug, frikanalen
   3 Date: 2013-03-03 07:15
   4
   5 <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
   6 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
   7 support using
   8 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
   9 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
  10 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
  11 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
  12 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
  13 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
  14 using the GNU LGPL, and
  15 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
  16
  17 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
  18 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
  19 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
  20 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
  21 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
  22 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
  23
  24 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
  25 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
  26 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
  27 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
  28 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
  29 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
  30 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
  31 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
  32 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
  33 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
  34 signal distribution is handled using
  35 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
  36 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
  37 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
  38 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
  39 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
  40 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
  41 them up a bit more first.</p>
  42
  43 <p>The development is coordinated on the
  44 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
  45 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
  46 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
  47 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
  48 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
  49 development.</p>