The software hierarchy is dictated by 2 main goals: recording and streaming of the video streams encoded inside the box.

The video boxes are the boxes we deploy to each room. These will run ffmpeg to grab the output from the H.264 encoders and send that to our voctocore servers.

We are currently using a vanilla Debian GNU/Linux 11 as our base system. Additional software is distributed and installed via Ansible.

If you want to realisticly fake the streaming output of a video box, that is easy! Use a recent version of youtube-dl:

youtube-dl -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs -o 720p.mp4
ffmpeg -re -i 720p.mp4 -c copy -f mpegts udp://227.0.0.2:9000

Testing your stream is easy. Use either mpv:

apt-get install mpv
mpv tcp://aw1126-slides.local:8898/

...or ffplay (from the ffmpeg package)

ffplay tcp://aw1126-slides.local:8898/

You can also use the IPs instead of the .local addresses.

cat ./hosts/voctops | cut -f3 | xargs -n1 wol

The videoboxes will do PXE boot if they can not load an OS from the SD card.

To re-install a videobox, simply make sure it will not boot properly by nuking the install on the SD card.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=512 count=1

Our dear networking team has assigned us 185.175.218.0/24. We will be using static DHCP bindings for the boxes and vocto containers.

We will not use separate networks, but it never hurts to have some logic in your addressing plan.

• Servers, control hosts etc. are in 185.175.218.0/26
• Vocto laptops are in 185.175.218.64/27
• Staff laptops are in 185.175.218.96/27
• Videoboxes are in 185.175.218.128/25

cd hosts
cat voctops boxes | ./gen-a-records.sh > a-records
cat voctops boxes | ./gen-ptr-records.sh > ptr-records
./dhcpdgen.sh < voctops > voctops.conf
./dhcpdgen.sh < boxes > boxes.conf

Listed in hosts/voctops and hosts/boxes