I spent most of the last week at the Asus WWCL and GameStar Liga finals in Germany (the Gasometer in Oberhausen to be exact), helping with the gamer-FM live coverage. Here’s a short diary of the event:
Wednesday, 24th August 2005 – I still haven’t learned how to write in stardates … just kidding. ;)
After a bad start (unforseen hardware problems keep me at work longer than I had planned) I leave Ettelbruck at about 15:30. After a mostly uneventful trip (special thanks to my navigation system for guiding me precisely to my destination) I arrive at the Gasometer, help arrange some tables, transport some stuff inside and then go to bed (at least I can’t recall having done anything extraordinary that day).
Thursday, 25th August 2005 – First streaming tests. The Media PC is causing us trouble. When changing from one video to the next one, the graphics card apparently switches off and on for a few seconds, causing a loss of VGA signal on the output which looks very ugly on the beamers (and probably on the stream as well, given that they use pretty much the same signal). So we switch off usage of the video hardware accelleration (video overlay) but now we cannot access our playlist any more while the videos are playing (they have to be full screen on both virtual displays now so the playlist is ‘behind’ them … or visible on the screen). Our attempts to find a remotely controllable media player failed, VLC insists on using video overlay mode (which, as we’ve already already established, is not acceptable for us) and Media Player Classic‘s web interface proves to be useless (no way to edit the playlist). So we abandon cloning and resort to a multiple desktop setup that should allow us to put the video windows onto one display and have the player (with the playlist) visible on the other one. Unfortunately the graphics driver of the card we’re using (nVidia) thinks it is a great idea to create a single virtual 2048×768 display instead of letting Windows manage to separate 1024×768 ones. The result of this is that we cannot put the video window onto the second screen because it spans over both displays as soon as we maximize it.
Fortunately my furious swearing and mutterings about how crappy nVidia graphics cards are gets heard by Komandar who quickly returns with an apparently non-functional Shuttle PC, which the event organizers could spare, containing an ATI card. After having swapped the cards, we quickly see that ATI’s video overlay mode is no better than nVidia’s (temporarily switches off the output signal, causing serious jitter and flickering on the beamers) thus we resort to the ‘dual-desktop’ setup again which this time works flawlessly: Just open Winamp, put the video window onto the second display and maximize it there et voilà : instant digital video playout system! OK, more or less instant ;), and if you know me, you’ll also know that I’d never have thought that I would ever recommend Winamp as video player but I guess, that in this particular case, I will have to make an exception.
We spend the rest of the day cabling audio and video feeds then leave to grab some rest over the night.
Friday, 26th August 2005 – Finally we’ve got all the required hardware (DVI adapters, cameras, …) and can run our final testing, everything looks OK for the big show.
Streamserver online, start… sound but no image … arg! The particular trailer we have chosen to start with was encoded in MPEG2 and the PC we’re using for our ‘digital playout system’ doesn’t have the corresponding DirectShow Decoder. So I quickly shove in a different video and then head over to SourceForge to grab (and install) a copy of gplmpgdec (a GPL MPEG1/2 DirectShow decoder). With the codec problem fixed, we seemed to be on the right track, until everything went black in the middle of a game cast: power outage! Turns out the extension cord overheated, causing the circuit breaker to do its job and cut the current. We rearrange the cable (it was previously lying in a single heap underneath some of the decorative cloth) and move some of the stuff connected to it to a different phase to reduce the load. That seems to have done the trick as the rest of the day passes by without any further issues.
Saturday, 27th August 2005 – Have some trouble to bring up the stream server in the morning, maybe it doesn’t like the low temperatures. It runs fine throughout the day though and we decide to leave it running through the night so it won’t cool down. Can’t remember anything special happening on that day, apart for a strange discussion on Battlefield 2 dextrose drops and their invasion of our planet, on the way back to our accomodation.
Sunday, 28th August 2005 – Upon arrival, the streamserver is off but apparently nobody has touched it during our absence. Starting it up proves to be a much more difficult task than yesterday as it randomly crashes and powers off during POST and/or Windows startup. Trying to convert the low quality stream server initially fails. I eventually manage to do it but in the meantime the main server has come back, so we decide to use it and pray that it holds together like it did the day before. Unfortunately we’re unlucky and it crashes a few hours later, leaving us no other option than to shut down the low quality stream to use it’s server for the high quality version. As the day progresses, I keep doing more and more mistakes on the video switching matrix (forgetting to switch to the correct PC input before switching the main input to the grouped PC one), which somewhat reduces the professional look of our stream, but all in all I guess it was an OK day. After all prizes have been distributed and most people left the location, we start packing up (undoing several bazillions of knots in the cabling) and then leave for home where I arrive at about 2:00 on Monday morning.
To summarize, we saw some pretty suspenseful matches (I’d never have thought that I’d find it entertaining to watch a game of Pro Evolution Soccer 4 or, even worse, Counter-Strike 1.6, the game that used to haunt me during my LAN organizer times) and even though it was exhausting, it also was a very funny weekend which I wouldn’t want to miss it in my memories. Special thanks to all of my gamer-FM team/crewmates for letting me tag along.
Whew, pretty long article but there you go, another (actually the first one in this blog) report from my boring life. Oh and if you want to see what we actually produced over the weekend, head over to the gamer-FM news article providing the download links and pointers to the rest of the coverage in German.