Stephan Janssen, the father of Devoxx, just shown me the Devoxx’s backstage this afternoon, where some nice angels creates the paradise’s content. There’s 50 people in the team, with something like 35 technical and professional audio/video team. The team is hidden behind you when you sit in one of those big room, just up stair. In a long technical gallery, there’s all the equipment for Devoxx.
(click on each picture for bigger size)
I’ll talk about the video and sound recording, the video projection part and all the network details. For the video, first, every session is recorded. There’s a bunch of computers to capture the output signal from a special plug that is adapted on the video output of each speaker’s laptop. There’s also some camera in the room, to capture the video stream.
Everything is encoded and stored on 2 big NAS. Every day, Devoxx produces between 2 To to 3 To of files (audio and sound). For the whole conference, there are 2 big NAS server with a capacity of 15 To…
This year, Devoxx will stream live on Parleys.com all the keynotes, and some session. The video and the sound streams are captured and encoded live on a special Mac with an hardware card to process the signal.
For the audio, there’s a big console that is used to mix the music and the sound. This is the console that crashed 2 years ago, because it was running Microsoft Windows…
This is not a baby console indeed
For the video part, the Devoxx team rent every year some of the most powerful video projector, Barco FILM HD18 DLP . Each of this nice box is 80 000 EUR. The videoprojector’s lamp is 7 000 EUR, just so that you get an idea (expensive is the word you’re looking for). With a capacity of 18 000 Lumens, this is just the light of the paradise. This equipment can do picture in picture with 3 signals. This is how you have those giant screens with video and slides… And I don’t think we have that for JavaOne.
Each of this baby consumes 4000 kW, the xenon lamp is 3Kw and has just a limited warranty of 750 hours… And we will have 7 of them up and running tomorrow morning. Yes, this is not very green. But who cares ?
This year, I don’t know if you notice but we have a great Twitter wall. See wall.devoxx.com if you read this article this week. And there’s a guy that check that everything is working, send the video signal to each room, etc.
And the network my dear… Let’s talk about the Wifi and what Stephan did this year. We have a 1Gb fiber channel that is running outside the Metropolis and one other channel to connect each floor. By the way, when I said « running outside » this is not a joke. Stephan explained that they couldn’t bury the optic cable in time, so the backup plan was to set-up an air-bridge from the building to the technical access point…
About IP Addresses, so that you know, last year the system was able to handle 1500 IPs at the same time. This year with the new system, it’s ready to handle 9000 IPs. Each of us, with their Smartphone and their Laptop consumes 1 to 3 IPs… The cost is really important. When you do a Geek conference, and you really want to offer the wifi, man, this is expensive. There’s 40 access points, so it should be ok tomorrow for the start of the Conference’s part.
Thanks to Stephan and congratulations to the whole Devoxx’s team.
