Max Maischein

I’m collecting different setups here. Other efforts are underway to organize a virtual conference. The setups listed below aim for smaller audiences with hopefully lower effort in setting things up.

I don’t discuss the other stuff needed for organizing a conference, like the social aspects (“hallway track”, “moderation”, “timekeeping”) or how people can forward questions from the chat to the speaker. The logistic aspects are mostly that outside of the “producer”, ideally nobody needs to install software beyond Chromium or another browser compatible enough with Jitsi to do video streaming.

Different Kinds of Setups

I’ll be looking at a sequence of evolutions to gain experience with the problems and ideally not have all problems at once.

The two programs I will look at are Jitsi Meet, an Open Source video conference tool and OBS Studio, the program used by most game streamers to send their video to platforms like Twitch, Facebook or YouTube.

Low-key setup using Jitsi

This setup works for up to 6-8 people. Each person needs about 1.2Mbit/s bandwidth to receive the video streams of the other participants and to send their own video stream. Jitsi themselves provide free chat channels so all you have to do is go there.

Features

* Open
* can be self-hosted
* can stream directly to YouTube

Pro

* highly interactive
* no setup, just go to [https://meet.jit.si/PerlChat] or any other
  random URL you make up

Contra

* not scalable beyond ca. 20 persons
* no moderation features

Medium setup, single presenter using OBS

For presenting something to a larger audience, more moving parts need to come together. As the presentation will not involve multiple people speaking, the one person can stream directly to Twitch or YouTube using OBS.

Features

* Can present and pre-mix desktop, application windows and/or
  camera
* Can select stream quality

Pro

* simple setup, just register with Twitch or YouTube for streaming, and
  enter the "Stream key" into OBS
* scales to 5000+ simultaneous viewers

Contra

* restricted interactivity on Twitch (text chat)
* only bare chat moderation features, much like IRC has
* chat participation requires registration on Twitch
* switching between speakers or having two speakers is hard

The chat could also be announced to be somewhere else so that people don’t need to register with Twitch to participate in the chat.

Medium setup, multiple presenters using Jitsi and OBS

For presenting something to a larger audience, more moving parts need to come together. The presenter can join the Jitsi chatroom twice, with two different Jitsi sessions. One sessopm will be presenting the desktop, or the slides, the other session will present the video of the speaker. Other selected participants may join the same Jitsi chat with the speaker. A third person running OBS then can re-stream either the presentation Jitsi window or the Jitsi window with the speaker video.

Features

* Can present and mix desktop, application windows and/or
  camera and multiple people
* Can select stream quality

Pro

* simple setup, only the "producer" needs to register with Twitch or
  YouTube for streaming, and enter the "Stream key" into OBS
* scales to 5000+ simultaneous viewers
* switching between speakers or having two speakers is possible

Contra

* restricted interactivity on Twitch (text chat)
* only bare chat moderation features, much like IRC has
* chat participation requires registration on Twitch
* "producer" needs enough bandwidth
* "producer" becomes single point of failure

The chat could also be announced to be somewhere else so that people don’t need to register with Twitch to participate in the chat.

Large setup

The Revision 2020 demoparty held their whole conference online and streamed it via Twitch to 6.500+ simulatneous viewers. In this clip they talk a bit about their professional infrastructure, a mixture of professional tools and custom software which they used to produce a high quality stream with live guests.

I’m working on getting deeper insight into their setup and will post an update if I get more information.

Another possibility would be to use a commercial provider like Zoom and hope that their capacity and moderation tools are enough to manage a large setup.