LINUX Unplugged - Episode 14: Negative in the Practical Dimension | LUP 14
Episode Date: November 13, 2013This week we’ll use the lens of some recent technical meltdowns to discuss this age old struggle of pragmatism vs idealism. Sometimes the practical choice kicks you in the butt, and you regret ignor...ing your ideals. And sometimes the free choice can’t do the job. This is a balance Linux users find themselves in more most technology users.
Transcript
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This is Linux Unplugged, the weekly Linux podcast still licking our wounds from a technical meltdown and basking in the glow of ideals.
My name is Chris.
My name is Matt. My name is Matt.
Hey there, Matt. So we made it. We're on the air. Despite what the technical snafus might
have tried, we've made it. It took a little behind-the-scenes magic. So last week for
the Linux Action Show, we had a great interview with Joss from OpenSUSE, and we were just
marred in technical issues. We got like a two-hour late start while the guest is waiting.
He's got to go catch a flight, so total pressure is on.
And there we were, like, literally swapping hardware.
Streams going up, streams going down, recording starting and crashing.
It was touch and go.
And it's funny because it all comes at a time after where I, as a Linux user and an open source advocate,
free software believer, had to struggle with going with the practical solution, right?
Right.
The solution that the business owner has to go with to do media content and specifically
video production.
And I really had to fight this.
And I ended up going with the practical route.
And then as it all collapsed down around me, I thought, this is what I get.
This is what I get.
So I'm going to talk about that today because I think this is in some some form or another, an issue that a lot of Linux users struggle with.
Oh, I struggle with it every day.
Yeah, I do too, actually.
And sometimes you walk that line and you win some and you lose some.
But first, at the top of the show, we usually like to do some follow-up.
And I had a whole bunch of really good follow-ups and then I somehow had a copy-paste failure and lost a lot of them.
But Ben comes to the rescue.
So you might have heard of this little thing called Linux Format Magazine.
Now, you might be missing Linux Format.
I don't know.
I know I certainly have.
But perhaps today you saw a new bat signal up in the sky called Linux Voice.
Well, Linux Voice is an Indiegogo campaign that's just been launched by, I believe,
some of the guys behind the Linux Format Magazine.
And one of those guys, his name is Ben Everard,
Everard, I believe he said it was.
And he's joining us right now.
Ben, welcome to Linux Unplugged.
Hi, I'm glad to be here.
Hey, man.
Well, thank you, first of all,
for joining us literally at the last minute.
Yeah, we just launched the campaign yesterday.
It's a really exciting time for us.
Yeah, no kidding.
That's why I wanted to get you on.
So what are you guys doing here?
I know Linux Format, and I know that it was honestly,
Linux Format was my favorite Linux magazine of all of them.
I know you guys are trying to raise some funds.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Basically, we want to do more or less what we did with Linux Format,
but we'll be free from the oversight of future,
so we can do it exactly the way we wanted to do it,
which means a lot more giving back to the community, a lot more community involvement.
So if you've seen the campaign, you'll know we'll be giving 50% of our profits back to the community.
And we'll also be making our content free online after nine months. And it's things like that that
we want to do differently. Oh, wow. Now, so is this going to be, this is going to be essentially what
people are familiar with from the Linux format magazine, sort of rebooted and refined? Is that
sort of what, if I'm envisioning that, or is this, is there something a little bit different from
Linux format? It's fundamentally, it'll be the same ideas, Linux format, the same rough layout,
the same basic mix of tutorials, the same aimed at the same sort of people, but hopefully done better.
Interesting. Now, can you tell me about the podcast aspect of it?
Banner, are you there? Hello?
Don't forget to push.
Hello, yes.
You've got to push to talk.
I know.
So now there's going to be a podcast component of it too, right?
Yeah, I mean, we've been podcasting for a while as TuxRadar, then as Linux Lifestyle.
So yeah, we'll just be shifting that over to Linux Voice.
That's awesome.
So it's a magazine, but it's also something people can put in their ear holes if they're
commuting, something like that.
Exactly.
And you guys have got, as some of the perks, you actually get like a print subscription
too.
So there is going to be a print version.
Absolutely.
There's this sort of vague rumor that print is dead, but we don't believe that at all.
I mean, print magazines are still selling really well. Linux format increased its circulation last
year. I mean, digital is obviously great, but print still has got a lot of life left in it.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's awesome. And I'm looking at the different tiers here and I'm
thinking, if I'm going to throw down a thing, I'm going to throw it down for a print
version. I guess I'm
one of the minority, but for this particular
type of content, I think I really like
the idea of being able to thumb through it a little bit. Of course, that's why
it's great. It's also a format in audio or
digital, so if I wanted to throw it on
a device, I could.
Very good, Ben. Well, I wish you
guys a whole bunch of luck.
Of course, we'll keep tabs on it. Is there anything else you wanted to mention before we go on?
No, just really encourage everyone to go and check out the campaign on Indiegogo and LinuxVoice.com.
Awesome. And we will have a link to it in the show notes. So folks, go over to episode 14 of Linux Unplugged on Jupyter Broadcasting. We'll have a link to the Linux Voice Indiegogo project.
Well, Ben, we're going to go into one bit of feedback
that I did grab this week.
You, however, are totally welcome to hang out with us.
Part of Linux Unplugged is sort of like an online lug aspect.
We let people hang out and chat with us as we do the show.
So you, sir, are more than welcome to hang out on air if you'd like,
or you can take off if you need to to get on with your day
because I know you did have to join us at the last minute.
But interesting stuff, guys.
So I'll put a link to this in the chat room right now if folks watching live want to go throw in a little bit.
And, of course, we will have it in the show notes.
I don't know about you, Matt, but I love the idea of just having a Linux magazine in print.
I think it's really telling that people are still under the impression that print is dead because it's not.
I, for one, prefer Linux magazines in print.
That's just kind of how I like to absorb that.
And I really love the idea of the model they're running with.
I think it's fantastic.
I think it's really cool to see the writers running the show.
I think that's awesome.
I think their mission statement of actually giving back to the community is awesome.
I think the whole thing is great.
It is great.
It is great.
Anyways, you guys can go check that out if you would like. All right. their mission statement of actually giving back to the community is awesome. I think the whole thing's great. It is great. It is great. So anyways,
you guys can go check that out if you would like.
All right.
Well, I did,
I did save one email.
I don't know what,
I don't know how I lost all the other ones,
but it was probably pretty,
probably a pretty good one to keep because it was on our topic of last week.
So last week we talked about the dark male initiative and I was pretty bullish
on it at first.
Now, as I've had some time to reflect on it, I don't know if... I mean, honestly, they're just...
Nobody's unseated email yet. And that might have been to Adrian's point. He writes in,
my main purpose for this email after... By the way, he had a bunch of very nice things to say
about the show, but I cut it down to... He said, my main purpose for this email was about the
potential of Dark Mail. Thank you very much for an informative unplugged session
on the proposed new protocol considered for
replacing email. I would like to ask if this may
also benefit the world, then it may be significantly
what could it may significantly reduce the amount of
spam and fraudulent emails, if I'm correct,
mail could be encrypted with something like private
and public keys. Number one, if the email
requires encryption, which takes longer to
process before sending and will cost
more in the spmer's resources.
So then would the spammers be less likely to bomb domains?
I don't know if that's necessarily true now because the type of encryption we're talking about is not very expensive.
Now, bitmessage type stuff, there's a lot more.
So bitmessage actually has something called proof of work
that you have to complete, a math question that you have to answer
before you're allowed to send. And that, if you've tried BitMessage, you've noticed it can sometimes be
CPU intensive when you send a message. That's exactly why. And that becomes just not scalable
for spammers. But something like signing an email with your GPG key, that's not going to slow them
down. No, not even close. Number two, if the recipient has to decrypt the message, then only
a public key of the sender will successfully reveal the message.
This suggests that the spammer pretends to be eBay.
Then unless they have eBay's private key message, they'll not be able to decrypt quickly.
That is true.
That is a nice thing is if you have a good key structure set up, then you can – at least it cuts down on phishing.
Number three, he says, I do not know how public keys will be stored, but I can guess if a company is requesting tens of thousands of public keys, they're either on a mega legitimate company or a spammer and they would get noticed.
And that's interesting if you need somebody's key to send it to them.
Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point.
He says, I'm sure you may think of more ways, but the hope is not only to improve confidentiality with Darkmail, but also to reduce spam.
We'll see.
And he's in Stonehenge, England.
Good stuff.
Yeah, some interesting thoughts.
I guess after we did the episode, ours ran a piece about how LavaBit was never all that great security-wise.
And I thought the timing was a bit of a takedown because they're doing the Dark Mail initiative.
And they're not using the same technologies for the Dark Mail initiative that ours was writing a takedown on. Yeah, but fax never stops ours before.
I mean they nitpick whatever they want.
They kind of slap it out there.
Bam, so I went there.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
No, so I'm just saying there's –
Make those businesses fail.
Oh, man.
Yeah, I mean just their whole approach is – I mean here's the thing about dark mail.
For it to succeed, it's really, really, really simple.
The services we're already using if they adopt
dark mail it succeeds if those services we're already using do not adopt dark mail it'll still
succeed but on a much much smaller scale it'll be much more bulletin board like it'll be more
dark mail it'll be like yeah yeah exactly it's gonna be like some weird mesh network or something
it's just it's gonna be very limited i think that's it. I think if Yahoo says, hey, Yahoo Mail is going to stand out and we'll adopt the dark mail protocol, or if Google says, you know what?
We genuinely are so pissed off that the NSA broke into our data centers that we'll adopt the dark mail protocol.
If those things happen, then I think we got it.
Well, I think it's a great opportunity for Yahoo because they need a way to differentiate themselves.
They're not really a search engine anymore. I mean they're basically just Bing's little brother using their stuff. It's true, though. it's a great opportunity for Yahoo because they need a way to differentiate themselves. They're not really a search engine anymore.
I mean they're basically just Bing's little brother using their stuff.
It's true, though. It's true.
So they have a real great opportunity here to say, you know what?
We're going to cut the cord.
We're going to basically innovate and really shake things up and take some risks.
Being a publicly traded corporation, that's always a little tricky, but I think it's worth a try.
Or you could be Zimbra, and you could be like, you know what?
We're going to integrate this.
This is another reason why you want to switch to Zimbra from Exchange.
That would be very helpful.
And that would be a really great testing area that if it succeeds there, then they can expand out.
Yeah.
Well, you never know.
You just never know, Matt.
Well, so look, I got to bare my soul on a few issues.
I went through a self-struggling and evaluation process behind the
scenes recently uh brought me to my core matt brought me down to my core i questioned everything
it had a little cloud experience with your lost links or no no this is just a couple of months
ago it's a couple of months ago and uh it was right before i spent a whole bunch of money
on on a big you know closed down lockdown down system with this proprietary software that costs way too much money.
And I really had to do this deep soul searching.
Do I really, really, really want to do this?
Do I really want to spend this money?
Or, and I was just being practical,
or do I want to reduce the scope of the Jupiter Broadcasting Network
and just switch to audio only?
And just say, you know what, 30, 40% of our audience, I'm sorry, we love you, but I just can't do
video anymore.
That would be gone to YouTube, be by YouTube, be by video embeds, right?
All gone.
We only do audio.
And that would be a massive reduction for the network.
But I was at this point where it's like I could spend five grand on a Mac Pro and another
grand on Wirecast and I could build a proprietary
I could build the next version of the proprietary system
that I use to run the network now
for recording and streaming
or I could just say I'm not going to do it anymore
I could let my ideals stand through
and say you know what I can't do it
I'm just going to do what my ideals
allow me to do because I'm also
the type of person where if I can't do it
well enough maybe initially I can't do it well enough but i feel like i'll eventually
i'll be good at it i'll start but if i feel like there's not a lot of chance that i'm ever going
to have it at the quality level i want i just i'd rather just not do it right yeah exactly video
production under linux i'd rather just not do it and when i think the the one thing we keep running
into with people's they say but you can do video production under Linux.
And they point to other popular video podcasts out there, one specifically to gaming, for example.
And they say, well, you can do it that way.
And I think that perhaps this is an opportunity for you to explain why that may not be a good fit for us.
So I'm going to talk about that.
But also I want to talk about how just in general too as Linux users, there's always these things that come up that we're like oh my ideals are one
thing but the pragmatism in me
is going a different direction and sometimes
in the long run you know you pull
an RMS a little bit and it turns
out that maybe
and the value of this is negative
maybe you should have gone with the ideals but before we
talk about that because that's sort of the
premise and you know what maybe I'll also
give the background since you were there. Oh, yes. You got to see what people watching live
didn't get to see while we were down. You were there. So I'll also talk about what the hell
happened this weekend. A lot of people have been asking about that. But before we do that,
I want to thank our sponsor this week, DigitalOcean. Now, you guys might be familiar with
DigitalOcean now since they were here last week. They're here again this week. And I'm very,
very excited. Now, if you're not familiar with DigitalOcean, DigitalOcean now since they were here last week. They're here again this week and I'm very, very excited. Now, if you're not familiar
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of great features too like Docker support, replicating backup images.
I like the Docker support, right? Oh, dude, Matt, the Docker thing is
we've talked about Docker. It allows me as
a sysadmin or it would allow somebody as a developer to create a completely isolated environment locally on their laptop, on their desktop, test it, get everything working just the way they want, spend all their time locally working on it, make that Docker snapshot, move it up to DigitalOcean and spin it up and have it running on one of their SSD powered VPSs.
Now, I'm looking at the Create Droplet screen right now.
This gives you an example of how intuitive their interface is. You give it a host name,
so like I could say unplugged for the host name, and I could choose which one I want. Now,
I'm going to choose 512 megs of RAM, 20 gig SSD with a terabyte of transfer. That's $5 a month.
And what's awesome right now, if you use the code Linux13, lucky number 13, Linux13,
they're going to give you a $10 credit.
So you can try out one of these VPSs for free for two months.
And the one I spun up, I put up in New York, and I went with an Archbox,
but they've also got Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and Fedora.
You could also just say it by application.
You know, hey, I want a LAMP server.
Or give me a Git server, right?
Or hey, this is a good one.
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go. Or hey, you know what? I need a WordPress blog. You can click right here. They'll spin one up. It
is so cool. And then once you get it just set up the way you want, you can create that image. So
then from that point forward, you can just spin up additional machines as you need based on that.
So like for me, I started with an Arch machine, got a really nice and minimal, just what I needed, got a few things set up, I could take an image of that. And then from then on, whenever I want an Arch machine, I just use that image if I want. It's so awesome. They call them droplets. It's really cool. It's based on KVM, which is great. Some great Linux technology using Docker as well. I love all of it. And really, when you're using the code Linux 13, you can try it out for free.
I've been using it recently to do backup recordings of our live stream,
to do BitTorrent sync distributions
of the Unfiltered Supporters show,
so that way people get better speeds
when they're pulling that down.
DigitalOcean also has something really cool
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And I love the fact that you can do a remote Arch install
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The great thing about DigitalOcean is I know exactly what my cost is. It's $5 a month. And if I use 900
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end of the month, it's, oh my goodness, right? Yeah, surprise. Exactly. It's a fixed cost. It's
exactly what I expect. And because it's there, I keep coming up with new uses for it all the time.
Trust me, you want your own Linux server on demand up in the cloud. And you can have it in
Amsterdam, you can have it in New York, and you can have it on the West Coast. So go to
digitalocean.com and use the promo code Linux13 when you check out. That lets them know that you
appreciate them sponsoring Linux Unplugged. And it also gets you two months for free if you get
that $5 unit. Or you can get the big boy for 10 bones a month and just have it free for that month
and just try it out. I'm not going to judge. You do what you want.
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And thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged.
Big thank you.
That's just awesome stuff.
And boy, I'll tell you, I've got a couple of items I might be rolling out onto this
here pretty quick.
Boy, howdy, Matt.
Boy, howdy.
Once you've got it, once you've got a system, there's like, oh, you know what?
I've been kind of wanting to do this.
I could do that up there. And then like something else, you you know what i've been wanting to do this i'll toss that
up there it's been really cool it's like someone just dumped out a big box of legos with every
piece i've ever wanted directly in front of me that i can build anything i want it's awesome
yeah it is pretty cool yeah uh so uh this week uh i gotta just take a deep breath uh we had a
rough sunday we had a really rough Sunday.
So I, Friday, we canceled the faux show
so that way I could take the studio offline.
Took the, okay, oh, I gotta back up even further.
I gotta back up even further.
Years ago, when we decided to switch from audio to video,
that's when we made the switch
from producing the Linux Action Show and related shows.
At that time, it was pretty much just Linux Action Show
on Linux.
We made the switch from Linux to a Hackintosh. I thought I could cheat, right? action show and related shows at that time it was pretty much just linux action show on linux we
made the switch from linux to a hackintosh i thought i thought i could cheat right i thought
i would get by and i would i wouldn't get a mac i wouldn't i wouldn't be legit right i'd do i'd do
a hackintosh and that that sort of made it okay and i didn't want it meant i wasn't investing a
bunch of money in apple hardware you weren't investing in the hardware and you still got to
get some geek cred and they also i could i could dual boot windows and linux on them and so i use
this time and i just i i was a contractor back then and i just made plenty of money and because
i was just working crazy hours as a contractor and i even had a bonus structure set up so when
i went over 40 hours i made like a good i made like a good percentage rev share of the revenue
from that client for the month so i was making good money, and so I spent,
within a three or four month period, I spent about $10,000 trying out
different hardware and software configurations under Macintosh, Linux, and
Windows, trying to come up with a solution to provide real quick, fast production
video and live streaming that I could then turn into these
shows. And I landed after
all of that testing on the Mac.
And that's when I went Hackintosh.
And this has been fine.
And this is a system that I've evolved and continued
to sort of improve upon
throughout the years, till where we're at
this summer. Then the summer comes along
and the Hackintosh starts to die. It's just gotten
old, and what we need from it is
beyond what the hardware is capable of. And there's no upgrade path for the operating system because
it probably won't boot if i upgrade it and now now the software we use is starting to require
new versions of the of the os and all these problems that you run into so i'm like okay
all right i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna buy a mac pro i'm gonna i'm gonna put the
os on there and i'm gonna load the software on there, and I'm just going to be a big boy, and I'm just going to swallow the medicine, right?
I remember this, and I remember right before the purchase, you really weighed out all your pros and cons and decided you're going to bite the bullet.
You're just going to do what needs to be done.
And clearly, this is going to solve all your problems, right?
I looked at the numbers, and I said, I really honestly considered for a couple of days dropping video because then I wouldn't need to buy the Mac.
I wouldn't need to buy the commercial software.
I wouldn't.
I could do all I could go back to doing all the production under Linux.
And now that I have, you know, now that Linux has gotten even farther, it's even better than it was back then.
Right.
So it's like there's more incentive to do that now than there used to be.
Oh, absolutely.
So I'm thinking, God, I mean, I would love to do this.
And so for a couple of days, I gave real serious thought.
And everybody listening, think about this.
All video production on Jupiter Broadcasting almost went away, right?
Because I really wanted to switch.
That's a big deal.
Yeah.
And so at the end, after really thinking about it, I knew that that would be just too much
of a loss.
People do not like it when you take away things.
No.
And going from video to audio is a big, totally different animal than going from audio to video.
Yeah.
Which is actually an addition versus a subtraction.
Right.
Right.
And so I thought, okay, all right, I got to do it.
So I bought, I bought the Mac pro, which has been marred with certain hardware failures,
which I've had all repaired under warranty, which is now fine.
Then I kind of strategically waited to deploy it
because a new version of the software that Jupyter Broadcasting uses,
Wirecast, Wirecast from Telestream came out.
Version 5 came out on September 5th, 2013, Matt.
And I thought, I'm going to give this time to cook.
Now I happen to know people who work with it.
They worked with it in beta.
Yeah.
And they gave it the thumbs up.
It's great. Try it. So I thought, okay, if I'm going to deploy this, people who work with it they worked with it in beta yeah and they gave it the thumbs up it's
great try it so i thought okay if i'm going to deploy this i don't want to deploy something that
i'm just going to have to update in a few weeks anyways right so i'm going to go straight to the
new version it's been out for since september give this a go oh boy so there was there's a lot of
bugs as so this is a case not to go with rolling right because here i am mr rolling, Mr. Rolling, saying I went with the new stuff, and boy, that was it.
Exactly.
Yeah, you kind of made someone else's point there.
But still, still.
So it had a few features, though, that sort of justified it.
It has x264 support.
Okay, sure.
Much superior video codec, right?
And that plays through in the remote network.
Like right now, Wirecast is capturing the screen from a computer
that is an entirely different room in my house than the
Wirecast machine is, right? Because it is
over the network, over the gigabit network, and
they improved it now so that the network
capture can do 60 frames per second
over the network. That's great
for games and stuff. Sure. So I was like,
okay, I kind of want that. And then
the last feature they added that I just thought
I just had to have
is the ability to take an RTMP stream
and pull it in as a camera source.
So when Alan does BSD Now up in Canada,
I could pull it in and retransmit it out
to all of our endpoints,
like Roku's, XBMC's, the audio stream.
Exactly.
So it gives a more complete,
all right, these are enough compelling features.
I know people have had it in production.
I'm going to go ahead and deploy it.
Seems like a great idea, yeah.
Then I've had nothing but issues.
So Friday – or Sunday, I'm sorry.
I mean how would you describe what was happening, man?
I was just –
So let me give you the spectator support.
Have you ever seen one of those really angry monkeys that were in the diapers that swing around from the trees and fling things?
That didn't actually happen.
What did happen is Chris worked really hard at trying to find out what was going on. Those really angry monkeys that were in the diapers that swing around from the trees and fling things. That didn't actually happen.
What did happen is Chris worked really hard at trying to find out what was going on. It was just basically one issue after another with it.
Basically, he would start up the stream.
He'd turn around, and then it would drop.
Yeah.
And he would start it up again.
He would stare at it for a little bit.
He wouldn't touch anything.
I'd just look at it.
Never touch it.
As soon as the eyes have rolled off of the monitor and he's heading back to the seat, it's down every time.
And so, and after a while it becomes like a perverse, bad joke. It's like, it's like,
it's like, seriously, it's like, there's someone out there with a clapper, like,
like trying to clap, you know, like turning stuff off. It was the weirdest thing. So,
and so, yeah, it was very frustrating. And so we actually,
you know, I'm an old enterprise IT guy, right? So I'm
about what's your disaster
recovery plan during
a core IT upgrade. So
I spent extra money, doubled up
on some hardware. That way, it wasn't like
initially I was going to be cheap about it.
And I was going to take parts from the Hackintosh,
like all the HDMI capture cards and some of the drives. And I was going to take parts from the Hackintosh, like all the HDMI capture cards and some of the drives.
And I was going to put them in the new Mac pro.
So that way I could spend as little as possible on a Mac pro.
Yeah.
And then I,
as I thought about it,
I thought,
you know,
if this doesn't work,
if this doesn't work,
I've got,
I've got mixed new and old hardware in here and I can't just immediately
revert back to the Hackintosh.
So I,
I spent the extra money and got new stuff all for it.
And so that way I could swap the two.
So there we were Sunday morning, already an hour late.
Our guest, Joss, had a flight he needed to catch.
He's in Germany.
It's 10 a.m. Pacific time.
God only knows what time it was in Germany at that time.
He's waiting on us.
We can't even be in the stream to tell him what's up.
And I'm too busy fixing to really even tell him what's up.
So I think, you know, I probably at least five or six times thought we don't have an episode this week yeah
yeah chris looked at me dead dead-eyed and said you know i said i i honestly i don't have a
solution to this i don't what do we do right and of course i'm you know i'm thinking i'm whatever
you need to do is cool but we're both just kind of shrugging going to ah you know what do we do
what do we do yeah and so i was like all right i'm gonna swap back so i swapped back to the hackintosh i plugged the hackintosh all back up
which never goes as smooth as it's supposed to right there was like little wiggly things that
i had to get right the hdmi capture cards didn't work so we had to shut everything off everything
all the computers had to be turned off all the camera everything had to go down then turn it all
back on didn't work we had to shut everything down again turn it all back on then it worked
the second time and when watching this it looked like you were playing
twister you know the hackintosh hackintosh has some sort of like gpu problem and it was totally
not working so then after switching to the hackintosh we knew we had to go back we had to
switch back to the to the new mac pro and try to get that solution which we just bailed from
working and at this point i'm thinking my god if we just get it up and a single camera shot on JAWS or on the chat room,
we'll just hit record and we'll just print what we get, right?
Right, exactly.
And so I put the new machine back in, hook everything back up.
And of course, there's like random bugs and wirecasts where all the HDMI interfaces get reassigned every time it restarts.
So that way, what was once the camera is now the Skype machine, and what was once the Skype machine is now the camera,
and what was once my bonobo is now the USB webcam, right?
And this just adds, of course, to the already growing workload.
Right, because then every shot has to be edited that refers to those cameras
to now refer to the new mapping every time.
All this is happening while we're trying to communicate with the live stream,
what's going on, trying to communicate with our guests.
Get back up and running.
Realize it's like one teensy-tinesy little config issue that was a default on how the audio got encoded, which I didn't even want.
Which was a changed default, I think.
I think it was actually changed without your knowledge.
It was applying AAC compression to the audio, which I didn't want.
I want uncompressed audio.
That's how I roll, right?
So changing that resolved the immediate crashing.
What I later discovered through correspondence, I sent them a few of the crash reports from the software.
Later correspondence with the support, I realized, I don't know why this was never a problem with the previous version, but Wirecast 5 is only a 32-bit application.
Oh, for Pete's sake, seriously?
So I got a machine.
How adorable, 32.
I got a machine with 32 gigs of RAM and then a 32-bit core application.
It's kind of like, wait, what now?
Yeah.
And so it turns out, like, X264, because it can utilize your system more, like, combined,
like, with the more processor threads and memory usage, the two things were just...
And I was sending an X264 stream off to scale engine for the
streaming because then the live stream would look better and again it was their default setting so i
went with that and so what i've discovered now is i fixed that audio compression setting so it's
just doing doing uncompressed audio right and i turned off using x264 for the live stream so now
we're using regular h264 the slightly inferior version of H.264. And so far,
the machine is now running, according to Wirecast, at 98% memory usage. That's how close we are. In
fact, I'll go check it right now because sometimes we even go over a little bit.
So help me to understand that. In almost 2014, they released a new version of an application
designed for pro use that's designed for 32-bit systems.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Yeah, okay, so right now it's using 90...
That's disgusting.
It's 93% of the memory now,
so there's just an S-ton of free RAM
sitting on the box not being used.
Yeah, it's completely not being used
because you can't.
I mean, oh my God.
I can't fathom how they would release a new version of an application that's running with standards from five, ten years ago. And they start working on it back in the day. And then by the time they get it to a point where it's good, they have all this legacy baggage.
And this is why Apple aborted Final Cut 7 and upset everybody, right?
Well, apparently that's what Wirecast might have needed to do as well.
Because, yeah, now they have all this technical debt that they're stuck with that is really plaguing it.
And I looked back at this and thought, you know, if I had that time, made the decision to just drop video for now and maybe in a couple of years.
Here's the thing, though.
I honestly don't think video production will ever come to Linux at the level it is available to the Mac.
Not unless there is a vested interest with high money.
No.
A company like Valve.
But even then.
It would require a studio that has a falling out with somebody that gets mad enough.
One of the reasons why it works for the Mac is because there's this huge ecosystem of software vendors.
Like Telestream making Wirecast.
Like Blackmagic making the Intensity.
All of the capture technology.
All the Thunderbolt peripherals.
All the USB stuff that all are designed to work with the Mac.
And that takes 5, 10, 15 years in the marketplace to develop businesses around it.
Like there's entire businesses that sell products around that.
And I think, I don't think it's ever going to come to Linux.
And I think what will happen is we'll just do it differently.
And that will be doable on Linux.
I think what we have with Hangouts, like look at what, Google now with Hangouts, you can do real-time lower thirds.
You can do green screening.
You can add all kinds of effects with the cheesy apps.
And you can do it all from Linux.
And it's not free.
It's not open.
And you're locked into a YouTube experience if you want to pop it out to something.
That's the problem.
But it shows you it can be done, right? And so maybe down the road, something – it sounds crazy today,
but I think if you would have told people that they do photo management in the cloud 10 years ago,
they'd say you're crazy.
I think video editing will become an online app in a lot of cases,
and the more powerful these web browsers get with WebGL and OpenAL and all these things,
I think eventually it's just going to move to something else completely,
and then Linux will just be included at that point.
There are some NOE editors out there
that are very, very early days,
very Windows Movie Maker level,
but I think it shows that, as you point out,
it can be done.
We need to basically give it time.
I need to win the Powerball
and actually drop some coin
into developing a solution of that sort.
I don't think –
Because I think it would be cool.
I think if you took Final Cut or if you took Adobe Premiere, which might be the more realistic one, Adobe Premiere.
Right.
If you took that and dropped it on Linux today, I don't actually think it would make much of a difference.
No, no, no, no. I think the key is to stop trying to emulate what they're doing on other operating systems and basically build on what already works for us.
Like as you pointed out, Google Hangouts is a good example.
Come up with a cloud-based solution that is not trying so hard to be something else but basically utilizes some of the tools we already have, HTML5, various other stuff on the back end.
All these little goodies put together and find ways of making the technologies that already exist work better and let it grow organically.
You know, I'd be interesting to see what happens.
So I guess –
Can I time you on this?
Yeah.
Hey, I was just thinking, you know, if you're going to move video editing to the cloud, that's going to need a lot more bandwidth than most people are currently capable of.
Right, but look at the way they do with Hangouts where you connect in, they do the switching remotely, and you stream to them and they record at the central location.
That's right.
Yep.
And that's the key.
That's the key.
What's Lightworks like nowadays?
Again, you know, it's okay, but the problem is the editor is – I think the editor is a problem that somebody is going to solve, but it's the whole – the hardware ecosystem, it's the codecs, it's all of it.
It's all missing.
It's the codex. It's all of it. It's all missing.
It's the ability to put something on a live stream and have all that available on the go.
Yeah, last time I chatted, Lightworks was only 64-bit, but it was pretty usable.
It was, and I think all video editors on Linux at this point are really good at making clips and adding transitions and throwing in some goofy effects here and there.
They're pretty good with that, but they don't really solve problems yet.
Lightworks is a professional program.
It's used for like movie studios and that sort of thing. The problem we're facing here is we have all the post-production software in the world on Linux that we could get.
We need software like Wirecast that we can use during a production
like Chris does during his shows.
Yeah, and that's becoming more and more common.
You're seeing a lot of people do live production now.
And just from an economic standpoint, it makes so much more sense
if you can produce things live in real time.
And with chat rooms and mumble, you want to be live.
You want to be streaming.
And you said about streaming, but you've got YouTube streaming.
You've got G+.
There's quite a few other options you could use
if you was all about the cloud streaming-wise.
Yeah.
If you want to go really old school,
you've got Justin.TV.
It's not about the service
you're using. It's about the effects
you can use and the stuff you can overlay the video and how you can transition stuff and maybe streaming from another box.
Are you eliminating an intern that needs to go and do all this stuff for you because you have a dynamic situation that you can do easily and quickly like Chris is able to do at this point?
Wirecast is really good at green screening, taking multiple different camera sources, combining them together, and then doing all of that on consumer purchasable hardware.
That's the big thing.
Me personally, I would use Lightworks with YouTube,
with the YouTube streaming feature.
There's an alternative to Wirecast called VidBlaster,
but it's Windows only, but it's much cheaper.
Yeah, well, it's cheaper for a reason, though.
You know, I mean, so Vidblaster was one i i in fact i've even considered using vidblaster for some things in studio like for uh
bringing a bunch of skype colors in and doing like a multi a multi box and then sending that
to wirecast as a camera source but vidblaster is not really a full competitor to wirecast
and when i was playing with uh lightwork specifically i was actually one of the early
beta testers.
It's good software, and it absolutely – yes, it was absolutely used in a number of well-known, recognized films for production, actually creating a film.
But it wasn't – to my knowledge, I don't know how it would be used effectively to work with a live program.
Via YouTube, eh, maybe.
Kind of, not really.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not really sure how that provides the kind of functionality we're dealing with now.
I don't see it.
You know, and the Lightworks just looks to me
like your standard NLE,
where it's not even made to do live production.
It's not.
It wasn't designed for it, no.
The most I've even seen regarding live production on Linux is, Matt, what was that software that you've always promoted back when you were using –
Oh, I was involved with it. Webcam Studio.
Yeah.
Yeah, Webcam Studio was – it was kind of like – it's kind of like a Babylon 5 where it was meant to do one thing and ended up going a completely different direction.
Someone else took over the project, and it's kind of just hopping along at a real snail's pace.
The problem is just the back-end technologies just weren't effective enough.
And no matter what language you wrapped it in,
the problem was that the underlying tools just weren't quite there.
That being said, that could change over time, but it's just not quite there yet.
The problem I had with it is I would use it one time,
but it would have one user interface,
and the next time you use it, the user interface did a 180.
That was Patrick, and the next time you use it, the user interface did a 180. That was Patrick, and
we certainly talked about that. He felt like
he wanted to continuously, in
his eyes, improve it in a way he
felt was good. I
would have preferred it just stuck to something that was
maybe voted on or just something a little more
tame, but he
had a vision for it, and I think he was
just trying to find what worked for him in his eyes,
and I can't speak to it specifically.
But I would agree that I really wish it would have stuck to one thing or another because it was – I had to relearn it too, and I was part of the project.
So every time you do a new one, I'd be like, oh, I have – the SVN would come out.
I'd be like, okay, oh, wait.
What the hell is this?
How is this working?
Where do I find it?
Yeah, it's totally – I totally get where you're coming from there.
Yeah, I think that was part of its failure is it kept changing every other week from what I saw.
That was part of the failure.
Yeah.
The other part of the failure that I experienced from most people was that the technology wasn't universal from, say, Fedora to Debian, from Debian to Arch, from this to that to the other thing.
Everybody had a completely different experience and performance.
It was wrapped in Java, which, of course, added a whole other layer of challenges.
And there are just a lot of – there are a lot of factors yeah yeah for sure also going back
to uh lightworks you're forgetting too that lightworks is not an easy program to learn
no it's not the interface is very old school and analog style so like it takes some getting used
to that's for sure yeah i completely agree it is very different. So I want to stop here for a sec and sort of like rotate the conversation a bit to this really came down to probably for me one of my biggest ever like as a Linux user like moments where I was like, what am I going to do?
Like this is coming down to like, you know, my core beliefs, but also the practical business sense in me who says, well, I know as a businessman, I'll be cutting my arm off if I drop all video support.
Well, come down to, would you like to eat next month?
I mean, really.
Yeah.
I mean, that's really the meat and potatoes.
Yeah.
And, you know, so this was, so I want to talk a little bit about like some of the things we struggle with there.
And maybe we'll get the Mumbles room take on some of the things they've run into.
And maybe if in the end we aren't all happy if we do stick with the ideals. But first,
I want to talk about Ting because Ting
is a perfect sponsor for the Linux Unplugged
crowd. Ting is mobile that makes sense. My mobile
service provider and Matt's mobile service provider.
You can get started by going over to
linux.ting.com. Now, Ting does
things really different than most carriers.
First of all, no contracts, no early termination
fees. I know you guys like that quite a bit.
The other part is you're in control. You own it and you only pay for what you use. They take your minutes, your messages, no early termination fees. I know you guys like that quite a bit. The other part is you're in control.
You own it, and you only pay for what you use.
They take your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes.
They add them all up at the end of the month.
Whatever bucket you fall into, well, my friend, that's what you pay.
Yeah, actually, it is true.
It is true.
You don't have to know somebody in the biz to get a secret deal.
Ting's got your good deal.
You just pay for what you use at Ting, and you can get started by going to linux.ting.com they got a lot great a lot of great devices some
really good devices and testing if you know what i'm talking about iphone iphone
yep boy we both had a little uh tickles in our throat that's weird yeah weird craziness uh so
and you can always stay up to date on what ting's up to by going to blog.ting.com. Uh, and I want to say, go over there because you're going to be pretty
impressed. Average Ting bill is $21 a month per line. Now, did you know that Ting is a shared
pool of minutes? So if you have several phones on a line, you guys all just pay for what you use.
You just pay $6 for the line. So for, in my case, if I have myself and my mom on a plan or myself
and my wife on a plan, each of us will just end up paying for whatever we use,
but we can share from a pooled set of minutes.
We can also include, and all these plans include
hotspot, tethering, voicemail, picture messaging,
caller ID, all the stuff you'd want.
And they have a, there's an excellent Ting app
and an excellent Ting dashboard on their website
to let you stay on top of all of the stuff,
add devices, rename devices, remove devices,
order new devices online. It's really great. Their online control panel and the Android app together
give you so much visibility on what's going on with your Ting account. And I'm a year in now,
really, almost. 11 months, I think, into my Ting service. Yeah, about 11 months, I think.
I keep coming back to one of my favorite things about Ting, now that I'm a long-term customer,
is that dashboard. It's just so well done. It really sets the bar. And that's what I'd say about all things
Ting. They set the bar on everything. They set the bar on customer service. When you call them,
a real person answers the phone. They set the bar on how they sell to you. They sell direct,
they sell off-contract, you own the device. They set the bar on the way they bill,
and they set the bar on their transparency. People love Ting and I love Ting. I think you guys will love it too. So go over to linux.ting.com. That's going to take $25
off your first device. If you've got a device that's compatible with the Sprint network,
go check out the list of Ting's compatible devices because they're going to give you $25
on your first month of service. And if you're like most Ting switchers, that means your first
month is going to be absolutely free. It's going to blow your mind once you discover what a cell service should really actually be like. You'll never go back.
Even though there's no contracts and no early termination, you're not going to switch because
then you are going to be in a position of power. And as a pro user, I think all of you guys know,
that's something, it's like getting a Linux box without root access. It's just ridiculous.
Root access to your carrier. I mean, that's really what it is. It feels like you have root access to your carrier.
I call these folks.
I have a question or a problem.
They are not going to put me on hold and get someone else or deal with whatever.
They're going to solve my issue because they're empowered to do so.
You're the boss.
You're the boss.
So a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged.
And thanks to you guys for supporting our sponsors, letting them know that you appreciate them keeping the Ting show, the Unplugged show on the air.
And go get started by going to
linux.ting.com
Oh yeah! Okay, so
I bring this open to
the mumble room. Anybody can chime in anytime
but I honestly
I probably have never
struggled like I had a few months ago
and I tried to do it kind of because I felt like
it was a business thing. I didn't need to
make a big deal about it on there. I didn't need to say much about it. I just felt like,
I think I bitched to Matt like before we went live, like, oh man, I've been in a bad mood for
about two days. Oh, I feel you. And I, and I totally, I totally understand. I really do.
Yeah. It's just like, it's a lot of money. It goes against my ideals. And that was really part
of it was like, I don't, I don't like vote. I I'm a vote. I'm a big proponent of voting with your wallet.
I really think out of all of the
things that go on in this world,
one of the few things we have control over
is how we spend our money.
That's one of the reasons I recommend Ting.
That's why I recommend System76.
Because we can vote with our wallets
and we can actually make a difference by how we spend
our money. And I believe that by me spending
$5,000, or whatever it it was on a Mac Pro was not me voting appropriately. That was a bad
vote, in my opinion. Not going with an open source system was a bad vote. And in this case,
if Wirecast had been open source, I could have looked at that and could have determined,
holy shit, this is not a 64-bit application. I'm not going to spend $400 on this.
Oh, no kidding.
Mind you, I still would have bought it.
Even though it was, you know, $400, by the way, was the discount because it was an upgrade.
I originally spent $1,000 on it multiple times over.
So I've probably spent $2,000 on this wire, $3,000 on this Wirecast.
And not even, yeah, I was going to say not even counting all the support hardware and other support factors that tie into it.
I still would have paid for it if it was open.
But I at least could have gone and figured out on my own if it was,
if it was 64 bit and it was a total black box until I bought it and I took it
home and I unwrapped it. Boom.
There's a 32 bit stinker in the box for me.
Is with Apple having this push towards everything 64 bit.
Why did Wirecast stick with 32-bit?
I think that's just legacy, man.
I think it's because it's so much of what it would be,
such a fundamental amount of effort to rewrite it to 64-bit.
They said they're working on it,
but it's probably a multi-year process for them or something.
Well, I think part of the two is they get something that works,
and then, of course, they have to slowly migrate that out.
So 64-bit could have been in the works for a long time now,
and it's still just not ready.
If you have to go through the trouble of updating all the libraries
and everything that goes with it.
Yeah.
I feel like if you pay $1,000 for an application,
that you need to step up and do that.
It is 2014.
Well, and to their credit, you know, like one of their developers,
I've actually now
been connected to a developer i believe based because i submitted some bug reports and um you
know so it's kind of funny like in some sense it was a little bit like an open source relationship
where i found a bug i submitted the bug the guy who's now taking ownership of the bug is now
contacting me directly and i'm giving him details but that's only because i i gave him a good bug
and and because i'm i'm technicallyate, I can troubleshoot with him.
It's because of their convenience they're doing it.
I've also had experiences where I've been completely left out, unanswered, right?
So I guess I feel like there's more control taken away,
and when it's a core business function,
that's where it needs to be under your control
in the absolute every sense of the word.
You really need to be able to guarantee it.
And if it was open source, I feel like that is much easier for myself to guarantee.
Well, I think so because if it's not being done, you have the freedom to go and find a shop or a person or a developer that will get it done for you.
You can say, look, this person's not developing it.
What can we do to basically work around it
or to come up with an offshoot?
You have some tools to work with.
You're not in some weird vendor lock-in situation.
All right, Mumbleroom.
So what do you think?
Should I have maybe tried going audio only
for a little while,
stuck to my ideal guns,
and say, no, this far, no farther?
No, no, no.
Absolutely no.
Absolutely no.
I don't think the fans of the post-show would have forgiven you. That's true. Yes, you say? No, I, no. Absolutely no. I don't think the fans of the post show would have forgiven you.
That's true.
Yes, you say?
No, I'm just kidding.
We're not biased at all in any way, shape or form.
Okay, let's look at this like a logical sort of way.
Okay, you're a YouTube sponsor, so you put your videos out and you put them out onto YouTube.
So you put your videos out and you put them out onto YouTube people.
Yes. You could put the audio out on YouTube,
but the thing is people probably wouldn't watch them to be honest.
Oh,
this show is mostly audio only.
Yeah.
But how,
I mean,
if you look at views on YouTube compared to this,
to this show,
the Linux action show is much more popular.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I started watching on YouTube, and then I found the website and watched all the back episodes.
But if I hadn't saw it on YouTube, I wouldn't have known about it.
That's really the big thing about YouTube.
YouTube is big about the discovery.
And so YouTube, we find, people find us on YouTube, they watch there for a little while, and then they transition to the site,
usually because they want it on demand, they want it in their RSS feed, or they just want to watch the HTML5 version on the website.
For a nice callback, I actually found Lass because of the Webcam Studio review.
Oh, did you really? Oh my gosh. about this on YouTube, but if it was not a video, I wouldn't watch it.
Right, yeah.
I mean, there's a thing I've noticed over the years too, which this is a little bit
of a pro tip for anybody who wants to start a podcast, I suppose, is nobody shares links
to audio shows.
Nobody does.
But if you say something in a YouTube video, people will share a link to that. And the other thing is
you can even link to the time code, which is really
nice. And so just for people
or like when, for example,
when we did a review of Cinnamon
2, Clem did a post on the
Cinnamon blog about it
and he doesn't embed the MP3 file.
No, he embeds the YouTube video.
I'd say unless
you're doing something like a distribution review,
the only show I'm really engaged in visually watching
would probably be the faux show.
Are you talking about my wife's boobs?
Awkward!
Technically, you just implied it.
No, it's the love of third.
Hey, Chris, I got a quick question for you.
If you had gone audio only how would that have affected
the sponsorship at all maybe yeah that was that was a part of the consideration because there'd
be less numbers right uh yeah youtube isn't so important i mean we love you guys on youtube don't
give me the wrong impression but i mean like if you came to me and said sorry you can no longer
publish to youtube i'd be like upset about it but it would not affect the business but you know if
you cut off all videos like all the downloads all the embeds on our website views, that would impact the numbers.
And so, you know, at least it would affect the rate we probably charge.
But I think, you know, part of it is there's just an extra level of cachet to being in video, I suppose.
I think with the sponsorships, you know, you display the product of System76.
You display the beautiful machines or you show the phones off for Ting or their website or how you set up a plan.
Yeah.
What about doing audio for some parts during the interviews and stuff and then just do editing for us and later?
If you're going to do video, you might as well do video.
There's no point doing part of it all,
and part of it video.
Go big or go home.
I guess it's funny, because here we are, a bunch of Linux users,
obviously very passionate about Linux,
but there is a practical element to it, right? I guess our
inner RMS only goes so far.
That's true.
I think it's a side of us that
see the whole open source versus free software argument.
It's kind of that point to where the open source folks are a little more in tune with just wanting to use it because it works or it's providing no vendor lock and it's providing various benefits where the other crowd might be more about – to hell with convenience.
It's all about ideals.
I guess so.
Yeah, that's just my view.
Freedom is negative in the practical dimension. Wow's that's pretty good actually i like that
negative in the freedom dimension all right okay so i continue to it's it was it was an
interesting technical battle because um it also involves every show has a profile like you know
which camera shots which lower thirds this show has a profile. Like, you know, which camera shots, which lower thirds.
This show has a profile for the chatroom shot or my screen or whatever.
There's a few other in there.
Pre-recorded or reruns.
And every show has to have a new profile built for it for Wirecast 5.
And that is a ton of work.
So this week has been marred in, like, the technical problems, you know, hitting just bugs.
And it's funny because there's still bugs that were there from four
and they're in five now too.
So it's like some of the same bugs
that used to cause it to crash
and now new bugs too.
But on top of that,
then it's creating a new profile
for every single show before it airs.
There was nothing for Unplugged
until about an hour before the show went on the air
where I recreated everything from scratch.
Yeah, and those are serious bugs, right?
I mean...
It's wild.
I mean, it has been a process, Matt.
It has been a process.
And so, you know, I go back to, I've been a big advocate of rolling software.
There's obviously, when you come into production, there's.
There's something to be said about stop working.
Yeah.
My wife, you know, when I told my wife, when I told her, I was like, well, I considered deploying with Wirecast 4.
But then I probably would have had to upgrade like a month or two down the road or even a few weeks.
She just looks at me and goes, you could have gone with Wirecast 4?
Noob.
I'm probably going to call the noob by my wife.
Well, yeah, because she's looking at it through practical eyes being like, why did you make this more complicated than it needed to be?
I think that's probably how she sees it.
I was like, well, if I got to go, I might as well go to the latest version.
It's been out for weeks.
And we trusted that you had a recommendation that it was going to work and the fact that it had been out for a few weeks.
We would assume, based on its price tag, that it would function.
But alas.
Surprise.
I mean, I don't want to know.
So it's funny because even in its sort of current state,
it is still more functional than pretty much anything else.
And it's interesting
because I've been using Wirecast
really since we went video, right?
Back when I was recording
the Linux Action Show
here in this office
with webcams and weird angles and stuff.
And, you know,
it got very little recognition
by the pro industry.
Oh, it's a toy.
Now, a lot of stuff that is going on live is using Wirecast.
It's totally worked its way into pro-level production.
So I think that's good for hopefully the quality of it,
but it doesn't seem to have directly impacted the quality just yet.
So is Wirecast the subscription service or is it pay once?
No, they're pretty good.
You buy the major version.
And then like, you know, 4, I had a couple year run at least.
And so I got every update.
You drop cash once and then you own it.
You don't have to pay a monthly thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And then I also got grandfathered in on the price.
Instead of having to pay $1,000, I paid like $390 or something like that to get the upgrade.
Wow.
And that includes everything, the virtual sets, the green screen capability, all of it.
So it's pretty functional.
There's an anecdote I just found.
Somebody was asking if there's ever going to be a Linux version.
And the reply from one of the community managers or moderators
said you could use a Mac.
Yeah.
Wow, that's their response.
You know, ironically, if they came out with a Linux version,
even if I would prefer just to,
even if it was still closed source,
I'd still prefer to have it on Linux.
Well, and they would probably,
especially as temperamental as it is,
they'd have to bake it in to one release, and then every time it's updated, it would have to be baked in to that release that is then cooperative with it.
It couldn't work in –
Not to mention the fact that they still have to work on a 64-bit Mac version.
Exactly, yeah.
So we're so far off, it doesn't matter, right?
I mean, yeah, totally.
Yeah.
And, you know, so there you go.
There you have it i also thought about you
know going audio only would mean uh like it'd be way easier to do shows on location doing audio
on location is is diametrically simpler than doing like it's just unbelievably simpler than
doing video oh yeah i mean i wouldn't have to i wouldn't have to drive i'd do what i do now
you know pants would be optional right um you Well, you can get away with that anyway.
Your legs are underneath the table.
You could be just in your boxes with like your nice shirt on.
That's true.
That's true.
Well, you know, I mean, Chris has always been great about wearing pants.
Most of the time.
Most of the time, you know, unless it's like No Pants Friday or something.
I don't think I've ever done a show with shoes on, but at least I'm wearing pants.
Well, you've got your comfy slippers.
Yeah, sometimes slippers.
Yeah, it just depends on how cold it gets out there.
That's right. I might have missed this, but has anybody ever looked at open broadcaster software?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Have you ever considered, like, for doing remote stuff, like TriCaster?
Yeah, TriCaster is another way to go where it's sort of like a dedicated piece of hardware.
But, you know, to get into a TriCaster to do what we need it's starting at ten thousand dollars yeah i was gonna say that
yeah and then it's a windows 7 box that i have to have in my house which and and to build onto that
when last time we went to the uh what was it the uh the convention that perlo was put on we actually
found i think a tricaster alternative we were looking at that product and again it was like
a windows 7 type box that product was built on... And again, it was like a Windows 7 type box. That product was built on Wirecast.
So Wirecast works on Windows or the Mac.
And I think one of the reasons
why it's gotten shittier on the Mac
is because they've been working
on their Windows version.
Right.
But that is sort of like a combination of things.
Like, here's a hardware appliance.
We've streamlined it down.
Here's a switcher for it.
Like, there's a lot of
a little more pro-level solutions
being built up around it.
Yeah.
We just need, like, an Indiegogo or something for Jupiter Broadcasting to get one.
I'm surprised I'm asking this, but would Wirecast work on Wine by any chance?
I don't – I couldn't imagine with all the video piping it has, hooks to QuickTime and whatnot.
I would imagine that would be a pretty –
That would be probably harder than bringing Netflix to wine.
Which was doable and did, but even then
the breakage was constant.
We have actually got Netflix
in the Firefox browser.
It took so long, they almost
have HTML5 now, but yes.
I think it was Pipeline. I also think
in some instances, at least some people in Firefox
actually had to use a user agent
switcher just because of the old...
Yeah, you do have to switch.
But it works, yeah.
I just use a Roku.
That runs Linux.
I don't know.
I mean, so the video production stuff is about as complicated as it gets because it's constantly pushing the GPU.
It's taking in multiple video signals from different sources.
It's writing to disk.
It's encoding video and streaming it over the network.
I mean, it is...
Basically, there's no more demanding software out there.
Like right now, I've got a pretty high-end Mac Pro out there that's running at almost max capacity because it all just pushes it.
And of course, it all got crappy when it went to HD.
That's where things really got difficult.
Oh, definitely.
where things really got difficult.
Oh, definitely.
Well, and going back to the whole crowdsourcing campaign,
a good example of what that would actually look like is let's roll back to the OpenShot campaign
and look at where they're at currently.
It was successful,
but they're still trying to build this out
in a way that's going to be practical.
So even if we, you know,
that's how big of a project it is.
And like I said earlier,
I think, you know,
that's only a very small part of the overall plan.
Yeah, exactly.
But listen,
I think we should probably wrap it up because who knows how much longer this thing is going to run.
But I did have an email I want.
I know.
No, seriously.
We go too long, this thing might just run out of memory.
See, what I said earlier was at 95% and right now it is at 95%.
Good.
Oh, it was at 93% earlier.
Now it's at 95%.
All right.
Well, we do have a final email I wanted to touch on before we run.
So this one came in from Jonathan.
He says, thanks for the great show and all the work.
I was hoping you could announce the release of Sonar GNU slash Linux 13.10.
Thanks to the Sonar campaign, we were able to get better sounding voices for the Orca screen reader.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, this is a distro that is targeted to folks with disabilities.
We're working on some LibreOffice buffs, but not sure when Sonar will release those.
Sonar has an assistive technology for blind users,
like the Orca screen reader,
screen magnification for low-vision users,
a font included for people with dyslexia,
an on-screen keyboard with customizing the mouse
for people with low motor skills.
He says there's also software included for paraplegics
to move the cursor of the mouse
just by moving their heads or eyes.
And you can find it at sonargnulinux.com
sonargnulinux.com
I'll have a link to that in the show notes.
How awesome is that? And he wanted to spread the word because
they just shipped version 13.10.
That is awesome. I mean, you know, because I've looked at
other projects. I think it was
the Adrian setup in the Knoppix and
things like that. You know, I've looked at other stuff
like this, but I love the fact that they have better voices in Orchid because that's a big one.
And the fact that they're addressing dyslexia is mind-boggling.
I mean I don't have dyslexia, but I have a laundry list of learning disabilities.
And so for someone like me, that would be awesome.
That would be great.
Yeah, that is really cool.
So Jonathan sent that in, and I might try to remember to give it a mention on last, too, just to help extra spread the word.
Because I feel like there's so much opportunity there, and we need to start working on it now because the Microsoft gravy train is drying up.
And people aren't going to be sure to Microsoft, and we need to have – people are not going to want to use a tablet interface on their desktops, and the desktops aren't going away.
And so people start switching to Linux.
We need to have solutions available for people that have these disabilities.
So sonar.ganu.linux at sonar.ganulinux.com.
And we'll have a link to that in the show notes.
And congratulations to them
for working on something that really,
you know, probably doesn't get enough acknowledgement,
probably doesn't get enough attention.
Well, I love the fact that rather than doing
what a lot of other similar projects have done
to where basically they just keep redoing
what's already out there,
these guys are not only trying to make it better, but they're actually addressing specific needs such as better voices and other factors that weren't being addressed previously.
So I love that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Good stuff.
All right, Matt.
Well, that brings us towards the end of this week's Unplugged.
Now, don't forget on Sunday we're doing our OpenSUSA 13.1 review.
I think that's going to be good.
Looking forward to that. And that'll be two weeks of OpenSUSE 13.1 review. I think that's going to be good. Looking forward to that.
And that'll be two weeks of OpenSUSE love on the big show.
And you guys can join us for that on a Sunday morning.
Don't forget, you can join us live for this show, too, for Linux Unplugged.
On Tuesday afternoons, we start at 2 p.m. Pacific over at jblive.tv.
JupyterBroadcasting.com slash calendar has it in your local neck-of-the-woods time zone.
Don't know what that is.
That's time math.
We have computers that do that for you.
We have time.
Yeah. Even with time zone changes, we have time. Oh, we can also get ahold of us. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and pop that contact link and send us an email
or visit linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Matt, I'll talk to you on Sunday. All right.
Sounds good. See you then. All right, everyone. See you right back here next Tuesday. Bye-bye.