AirVenture 2012 Webcam Official Thread

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Originally Posted by dmbleess

You guys definitely have done a great job this year turning a baling wire and duct tape budget into a great setup. Every year it seems to get a little better as you find new ways to improve the system.

Thanks again for all of your efforts.

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Thanks for all the support out there. We have tried very hard to make this years webcams a better and have a much easier innerface for the end user. Planning and testing started about a month after the end of AirVenture 2011.

We have taken many notes along the way this year of some of the technical issues that have presented them selves and will see what can be done to improve on them with the budget we do have.

We also have been working on other ideas that we hope to implement as well in future years, there just was not time to get all the ideas approved and implemented in time.

Todd

We are planning on knocking down the extra cameras to reserve as much processing power for the Air Show and Stuff Stream.

Theater in the Woods schedule for tonight..

7:30-8pm General Aviation Awards
8-9pm Greatest Generation in the Air

For obvious copyright and legal reasons the 9 pm concert will not be streamed, there might be something to watch if we finish our other volunteer tram duty. With the loopy heat induced sillyness in here today it might involve a vat of pudding and a strange pink flightless bird. Hal, you are invited, bring a spoon and a golfcart.

and yes, I did just use the camera to check out the customer line at the GoPro tent before I walked over there.. :)

I have modified the tours on the Warbird, Vintage cameras to allow more time on the runways and currently the Ultralight camera is fixed on the approach for Rwy 18.

ok, just to let everybody know we have been told we should expect severe weather this afternoon and evening with winds gusting up to 60mph.

We like camerman Tim, if there is weather as expected we will unchain him from the tower and let him go inside, as a result the stream may drop off unexpectedly. We will get things back online after we have finished clinging to our tents and small children.

man, we could use that storm they were freaking out about...its super hot around here still.

anyway, airshow is over and the rest of the cams are back in operation. Theater in the Woods starts at 7:30pm tonight and remember we are not streaming the Little Texas concert however we might let a cam run so you can watch Deeraf's head bobble with his pudding.

Hi, I'm watching from afar and the south, ultralight webcam is off line. It had frozen, staring north but you could at least see the planes come and go, now the feed is down. I can still get webcam central and the warbird webcam north. Thank you SO much for having these! I spent Sunday at my computer watching the arrivals with ATC.net playing. I miss you guys!!!

Hey, Paul, as if you're not warm enough...TITW feed audio sounds like the audio pickup is in the back of the house, not thru the mic up front.

There's a post on another thread that the south feed is dark, also.

Good thing there are TWO of you!....sorry, man, had to :-)

Jim

sorry was off attending to my other Tram duties. We have somehow lost connection to the Ultralight h.264 encoder. We will have to make the treck out there in the daylight and see whats happening.

I will talk to the theater techs and see whats up.

Thanks, Paul...you two ROCK!

We are looking into why the Theater in the Woods audio is poor tonight. We think it has something to do with when Little Texas setup their equipment this afternoon. Tomorrow we will be working with the theater sound crew to figure it out. The audio problem is not just from our end, it is also on the house tv monitor lines that run backstage, their main sound system was not affected.

We also are looking into why the Ultralight feed is down, we currently cannot contact any of the equipment installed at that location. We were all ready to head out there to check on the installation at the tower when a thunderstorm moved into the area. We will be heading out there tomorrow morning to start troubleshooting that location.

Todd

Well the rain quit, and since it was still hot out and now with super swampy air that will keep us from sleeping, we decided to take a midnight walk down to troubleshoot the problem with the Ultralight tower cam. Well the good news is it is back up and online for everyones enjoyment. We can thank this outage to someone that decided to unplug the equipment at the base of the tower. Our guess is that person decided they needed to charge their cell phone or laptop.

And even after a hours walk, it is still to warm and swampy to sleep.

Todd

See Hal. Walked. :)

I see indeed, Paul... All of us, and I in particular, already owe you guys infinitely more than we can repay... So just double that and put it on our tab. :)

In all seriousness, though, you and Todd are the unsung and heroic backbone of this whole project, which is the very definition of EAA volunteers.

We simply can't thank you enough.

(and we'll start looking at the transportation question for next year in, say, August...)

Hal...thanks for stopping by the thread. I'll address my comment to Hal, Paul, and Todd...

There are those of us out here who are willing to donate...pay to play...specifically to support Paul and Todds' efforts. Can you suggest a donation functionality that will 1) Get the funds to directly to the webcam gurus (they are the masters of making something out of nothing), 2) Let us know what equipment needed, as some of us old IT hacks have equpt that might be useful. 3) Tax write-off would be nice for $$ donations. :-)

Paul estimated between 950 and 1000 users viewing the airshow yesterday, and with the links open to the public this year, there will only be more demand in the future. I know this is a busy week for you three, but it's time critical...people tend to forget how much they enjoy the 'cams once the week is over, and apathy reigns.

Let me know if I can help in any way with coordinating this. Thanks!

Jim Rosenow
EAA 64315

The tour for the Ultralight camera has been revised to view runway 36 and the Ultralight runway with some view of the general area while moving from different tour points.

Todd

Again we will be shutting down the streams on the 3 tower cams during todays airshow and stuff camera feed.

Does anybody know whether I'll be able to see the Saturday Night Air Show and Fireworks on the Webcam?

unfortunately no, We just got notification from Discovery World's ISP about a major network cutover taking place saturday night from 6pm-2am. It seems "somebody" is sucking a ton of bandwidth. ok, thats probably not the reason but unfortunately we will be dark. Its a ton of donated bandwidth we are using, probably exceeding 45TB for the run of the show, so we can't really complain too much.

We hope it takes less than the scheduled time, if so, we will post here and be back up asap. If not we expect to be operational sunday morning with cams pointed to the departure runways.

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Originally Posted by Todd Ritzman

Again we will be shutting down the streams on the 3 tower cams during todays airshow and stuff camera feed.

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Cutting off the Airshow Audio as well ???

Tuned in at 5pm (local Oshkosh time) on Thursday. Camerman was doing a good job, but no audio.
No audio on EAA Radio either.

Someone hit the wrong switch on the audio mixer ???

Geoff

Strange. It was working the last time I was in the office. I forwarded the issue to the radio station staff

We are working the issue

Ok. Well, Just a reminder, the theater in the woods has no scheduled programs tonight.

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Originally Posted by Paul Hayden

Strange. It was working the last time I was in the office. I forwarded the issue to the radio station staff

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Thanks Paul.

When I tried again @ 7pm , there was audio, just enough to hear the announcement that that was the end of the show !! ( You probably got it corrected a lot earlier)

Never mind, there is always tomorrow for me :)

Geoff

I noticed the Ultralight Webcam quit streaming video around 1 AM. As of 5:45 AM, the other 2 Webcams are working fine, but the Ultralight Webcam is once again not streaming.

Paul....you've gotta see the humor in this. Maybe a sign that says, "This area monitored by video surveillance" ??? .... or point the webcam at the plug-in after dark and cache the stream?? :eek: Thanks again for all you do!

Jim

ugh...you have got to be kidding me. Ok, todd and I will walk out there....again....and see whats going on, probably the same issue.

tripped GFCI for some reason. To hopefully prevent issues went all ninja spidermonkey with the giant roll of duct tape. Ultralight cam is back in operation.

Tonights Theater schedule

6:45pm-7 Raspet Awards
7pm-7:15 - Rotorcraft Awards
7:15-8 - Mort Crim movie

after 8 we will probably be dark due to the Phil Vassar concert, unless we find something amusing to throw up there.

Is it too soon to talk about next year? :-)
Paul and Todd,
With a couple year almost under your belt I wanted to ask if you (when you get a chance) to compile a "wish list" of equipment and expertise needed to do what you think is needed to perfect your streaming system. I have learned a couple of things in working in corporate IT.
1) Ask for everything + 1
2) Sometimes It is easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission .
I am suggesting that all of us here look at the list and see what we could provide. I work for a couple of Fortune 50 companies that I could probably persuade to "donate" to the cause.
Just a thought
Rick

yeah. the first order of business might be a more powerful server. The dual processor dual core 2.8ghz xeon system we are running it off of can't keep up. All 4 cores are maxed out the entire airshow serving about 900-1000 streams. also I'm planning on taking a look at load balancing servers, then we would need another wowza license @ $1500.

Other misc stuff, a PTZ camera, housing and h.264 encoder for possible install at Seaplane Base, Mt Dew, new camera domes to eliminate those annoying scratches, a golf cart, GoPro cameras and accessories, pudding, spare h.264 encoders, and there is probably a ton of stuff I am forgetting.

These are just a few possibilities, but of course we have to run this past EAA and figure out what they want next year and how they wish to handle it.

and wow is it getting loud here, the crew is setting up for the concert tonight...ha, that way I won't accidentally give away the location of the bat cave..

we may have some cool video for you guys this evening, but until then business as usual other cameras offline during the show, back up after theater schedule I poseted earlier...too much Mt. Dew..blah blah..yeah

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Paul Hayden

yeah. the first order of business might be a more powerful server. The dual processor dual core 2.8ghz xeon system we are running it off of can't keep up. All 4 cores are maxed out the entire airshow serving about 900-1000 streams. also I'm planning on taking a look at load balancing servers, then we would need another wowza license @ $1500.

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Are you really trying to stream all those 900-1000 streams from a "PC" on the Oshkosh Site ?
What Upload bandwidth do you guys have ?

Maybe, if you have time, after Oshkosh, you might be able to post what equipment you currently have, and how it is configured.

Geoff

no of course not..there is no chance in hell that we could get that much data off the grounds and served to the world. its one DSL per camera out of the airport, the server that everybody hits is in milwaukee. Currently we are averaging 3 times the amount of traffic compared to last year when the cams were members only.

Airshow cam is going live at 2:45. At that point the other cams will be offline as per the usual this week. Might take a bit longer to get the cams back up after the airshow today as we have a limited window to get our cameras back from the very awesome FiFi crew.

we have a pretty stiff NE wind today and as a result cameraman Tim has had to take refuge on the south side of the tower. As a result his view to the north will be limited.

Passing along a text sent to EAA Radio: "Who can we email to give some praise to the great EAA camera coverage during the show" Since we don't read texts on the air during the air show...I am posting it here so that Paul and Todd can pass this along to our "Eye" in the sky.

cool...thanks for that.

anyway, the airshow is over and the rest of the cams are back up and operational.

Theater in the Woods will be up from 6:45 to 8pm with the programs I listed this morning.

We also got some super cool footage of the CAF's B29 FiFi as it did a flight around oshkosh, and no, its not shot from the outside of the plane. :) stay tuned, we will let you know how to view it...

Since the theater feed will be dark again due to another concert, Paul and I are working on putting some video footage together to play late Saturday afternoon before our ISP shuts down the network for the evening. We will post updates on when to expect a video if we can get it together in time.

ok, for your viewing enjoyment we have footage shot from inside FiFi as it did a few laps around Oshkosh yesterday afternoon. Its located on the Theater in the Woods stream and we will leave it loop all day. enjoy.

Thanks for the loop of Fifi. I am unfortunately going to have to ruin your entire AV. I found a combination of pc,software and hardware that does not work. I drug an old laptop( Pentium 3, 512 of ram, running Win2000) out of a closet to send for recycling. Just for giggles I decided to try it out. It did not work. Can you PLEASE, take some of your precious time, drop everything you are doing and fix my issues? ;-)
Thanks
Rick

lol! just for you, Boat Anchor support for 2013

quick reminder if anybody is still watching (seems like 50% fewer people are on the streams than previous days) that we will be offline from 6pm until 2am due to a network cutover being done on our host server location in milwaukee. That means all cameras and video streams will be non functional.