Once again, I got roped into helping out CSRfm and this time KTV in getting their OBs from Keynstock 2014 on air.
There were some not insignficant challenges. Our normal network access at Keynes was effectively cut off due to some changes to configuration. This was quite troublesome, as we had always previously relied on this access to get our signals back to our HQ. The outlook seemed bleak. What we ended up doing instead, though, actually seemed to work out rather better.
We ended up creating a private ‘Media’ network in the new Student Media Centre, and extending that from The Venue to Keynes via a 5GHz wifi point to point link (with some Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5’s that we happened to have lying around). Once that landed we flew CAT5e to the various rooms to get their data into the network.
As for the link, CSR’s audio was sent via OpenOB with an Opus link running at 192kbps – running on two Raspberry Pi’s each with Wolfson Audio cards. We ended up using Wolfson’s image with precompiled kernel and updating Raspbian to get the latest bits. However the link worked fantastically, sounded great (once we ironed out the level problems at the start) and didn’t audibly drop very much at all.
KTV were using a Teradek Cube to stream their video back to their gallery in the student media centre where a PC was set up to spit out the stream from it into their vision mixer. All of this was going over the wifi link between the buildings.