Preparing the 21st Chaos Communication Congress

As every year, the Chaos Communication Congress takes place in Berlin, Germany.

For six years, I'm part of the team that takes care of audio and video recording and streaming. Since this year I've become head of the a/v documentation project, I decided to use a 100% Linux based solution instead of the Apple Quicktime stuff that we've had for the last couple of years.

Thanks to the great ffmpeg software, we can even encode four different streams on a off-the-shelf Pentium IV.

Today, I've been with the technicians at the congress center who set up the PA and lighting. This was to make sure everything really reflects our demands, and we have the correct audio signal delivered to the appropriate place, etc.

Setup of the congress will continue over the holidays. Especially the NOC (Network Operations Centre) will have a hard time setting up the internal network for about 3000 attendees, certainly each bringing more than one networked device on average.