Most people outside AV engineering (if they know the EBU/UER exist at all) vaguely know its something to do with Eurovision and associate it with particularly bad Europop – but they actually do a lot of cool things behind the scenes. Basically they help everyone making multimedia in a country where the video system is PAL or 25/50p and mains electricity is at 50 Hz to produce and share the content.

That in itself is good, as even by accident Google and the Japanese whilst providing cheap platforms and equipment have also put confusion into the minds of many European producers who end up making 29.997/30fps videos, using American timecode in their audio kit etc.

Just because it works, doesn’t mean you should do it here – especially if you ever want your stuff to go to a national or local broadcaster.

But now the EBU are sharing all the info needed to make your own TV station using open source software and low cost hardware (its already easy enough for radio) – and all the info in English as well if you don’t speak Swedish or Dutch. This sort of setup costs about €200 000 for the cheapest small station (I used to install it 10 years ago), and the Europeans are giving it away! The old sod of a sales manager at a place where I used to work will probably have his wig come adrift and blow away in the wind due to the rage when he sees this!!

The engineers at the stations all freely admit Eurovision is mostly crap and the whole idea is to provide bland inoffensive music to test equipment with, other than North European nations who take both the music and the tech side seriously 😉 – but if they are giving away stuff like this they can make all the cheese they want (actually BE has good dance music).

Also the meeting is free to attend if you happen to be anywhere near Geneva in Switzerland. Discussions are normallly English (they may sometimes in French)

from http://www.ebu.ch

24/7 GRAPHICS & VIDEO PLAY-OUT
(SVT, SWEDEN)
The Swedish public broadcaster has
created a professional broadcast quality
graphics and video solution, combining
free and open source software and cheap
hardware. Motion graphics designer Jonas
Hummelstrand (SVT) will explain how
the software works and how it forms an
integral part of everything from news
shows, channel branding, and game shows
to special events, such as election coverage.
Additionally a CasparCG workshop will be
given by Robert Nagy (Redpatch).

INTERNET TV DISTRIBUTION CHAIN
(VRT, BELGIUM)
VRT of Belgium has built a complete
chain for distributing audiovisual material
over the public internet, which combines
tools for encoding (ffmpeg, x264 and
MP4box) with solutions for distribution
(Apache and mod_smoothstreaming).
The whole workflow is glued together
with some bash scripts and automakemagic.
The result is an easy-to-use
toolkit, which serves the three most
popular videoformats (Adobe, Apple and
Microsoft) from a single disc-format.
The complete programme of the EBU
sessions can be found at: http://tech.ebu.ch/opensource2012
For more information, you can also
contact: coinchon@ebu.ch