Re: Kernel 2.5 Workshop RealVideo streams -- next time, please get

Albert D. Cahalan
2001-04-17T04:48:24Z

Miles Lane writes:
>> Randolph Bentson wrote:

>>> I've heard of conferences where a wireless audience
>>> microphone was put inside a Nerf ball. It could
>>> then be tossed to the audience member who wished
>>> to speak.
>
> Seriously though, this would probably still be an
> impediment to the sort of stream-of-conciousness
> dialog that we'd like to have. Sometimes, there
> is a quick series of one or two sentence comments
> from several participants. With a "mike-in-a-ball"
> your discussion might turn into a sports event.

No, you just need a half dozen microphones. They get
tossed back to assistants on a least-recently-used basis.

> Plus, personally, I am a crappy ball thrower.
> If many of you have my level of athletic prowess,
> there'd be a lot of time spent scrambling under
> tables and chairs.

This is a reason to have athletic assitants, and another
reason to have a half dozen microphones instead of just one.

Still, the post-conference mixing from dozens of overhead
microphones looks best. It adds cost, setup time, and
post-processing time, but is totally reliable and does not
interfere with the conference at all.

If you wanted to get fancy, multiple overhead microphones
ought to let you cancel any sort of background noise with
a bit of 3d audio processing. Sneezes, coughs, footsteps,
people falling out of their chairs... all processed out.