site updated (incomplete) July 5, 2006

* Audio & video multi-sources mixing and streaming: hack the media

	INTRO

	In the nowadays well-known, still long term: information manipulation
	by private media corporations or even governmental institutions under the
	pressure of private groups pulling to their economic interests in turn to
	this harmfull capitalist system, and because of the noticeable control over
	the mass, it arises the need of free and open ways for providing a horizontal
	communication relationship which might let develop a real participative
	system for social and political construction, modelling, deconstruction and
	re-creation.
	
	Through this premise my works emerged.

	GLOBAL AUDIO & VIDEO CONTENTS PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION

	Taking the phrase: "An image can say more than one thousand words" in consideration,
	brings to the thought that a/v contents might result a much more richer resource
	than just written/read text.
	We are kindly entering the post-textual Era.

	Immersed in this context, al-Jwarizmi project emerged. From the collaboration
	of around seven people, who are part of the hackitectura.net crew.

	The need for participation requires the conversion of passive users (consumers)
	into active producers, thus achieving a two-way or even multi-way interaction
	between them and others'. Here is where PD enters the scene, as a powerful and
	flexible tool for developing the desired platforms for such communication
	methods.

	Now, the art as an expression of feelings and/or thoughts, and the wish of
	bringing it closer to other people reinforces the statement about globally
	distributing contents produced wherever around the globe. Then the conjunction
	of PD plus streaming technologies seems to serve as the core basis for this
	communication platform and way of connecting people and cultures we call:
	al-Jwarizmi.
	
	As read in the al-Jwarizmi FAQ, taking in consideration the TV as a failed
	cultural project, we should seriously think about replacing the TV and even
	the radio or at least re-create it with the help of new technologies.
	
	However this replacement or re-creation intends mostly to re-think about
	the concept of these mass communication tools, and direct their use
	towards a cultural resource for learning and social change.
	That means this project does not really intend the absolute TV or radio
	supression, but better interfacing the Internet streaming technologies
	with them to cover wider audience where the Internet can not, or bandwith
	is not enough.

	We can imagine a netradio from Barcelona being tuned in from the studios
	of a classic FM radio somewhere in Africa and being the stream
	rebroadcasted over FM waves locally in the other continent.

	This interfacing will help the treatment of well-known issues regarding
	the digital divide and thus develop solutions.

	WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTED PARTICIPATION

	No one is forced to participation but everyone *must* have access to it
	as a need for global balance. Why? Because otherwise there will be others
	taking part and decisions for oneself.

	In CorveraHack event (Asturias, Spain 2003) we experimented provisioning a
	webform posting against a PHP script which was sending us some text the users
	could post, to the NOC (Network Operations Center) and there it was merged
	with the video render windows which was being streamed out.
	In short: people watching the stream, could post some feedback through
	a webform, and some seconds later (because net delays) he/she could see it in
	the streaming window.

	There are many other ways of participation interaction even from remote
	some of which were already developed by Lluis Gomez i Bigorda
	and implemented in http://gollum.artefacte.org

	RE-BROADCASTING OTHERS' CONTENTS

	For information freedom's sake as stated in the first item of the hacker ethic,
	it is proposed the same idea to be applied for media.

	"The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is
	an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free (libre) software
	and facilitating access to information and computing resources wherever possible."
	(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic)

	Letting free flow of media for topics of interest will support their conceptors,
	producers and distributors, so I strongly beleive in the need for this
	redistribution idea as a way of freeing the contents, thinking about them
	as pieces of information.

	AUDIOFLOW & VIDEOFLOW PATCHES OVERVIEW

	What this two patches I made for PD basically do is:
	mixing several sources into one final mix to play locally as of
	streaming out to the Net.

	Both of them are able to send the final mix directly to other peers
	running PD and any patch capable of receiving peer2peer audio
	(using mp3streamin~) or video (using pdp_i).
	Audioflow and Videoflow can also receive peer2peer audio and video
	respectively.

	In an tipical environment where there are hosts connected to a same LAN
	or other *fast* nextwork, each Videoflow and Audioflow can be hooked together
	with others. Thus getting a wide network of distributed contents production.

	Audioflow is also capable of tunnning into two MP3 and two OGG streamings
	at the same time, and mixing them with other source, like those p2p mentioned
	above or hard disc MP3 (only, for the moment) as well as live soundcard inputs.

	Videflow, on the other hand, is much like Audioflow, but the possibility of
	tunning to video streams still needs to be implemented.

	Several experiments of mixing multiple audio and video sources, and also
	rebroadcasting remote streams, were done by me and others. And better yet,
	a lot more will come :)

	Rama @ riereta.net, this paper was written as an overview of my talk/presentation
	in the Graz PD-convention to be commited between September 27th and October 3rd, 2004.