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+[[!date "2022-10-23"]]
+[[!title "Backstage, captions, streaming, and more"]]
+
+Hello, folks! Here's the weekly update on what's happening backstage
+for EmacsConf 2022 in case you notice something that you want to help
+out with. =)
+
+- We've e-mailed the speakers instructions for uploading their files
+  through either a web browser or an FTP client, and three speakers
+  have already done so! Those talks are now available in the backstage
+  area (<https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/>), along with the
+  first set of edited captions (thanks Jai Vetrivelan!). If you don't
+  have the username and password for the backstage area and you would
+  like to access it, please e-mail me and I'll send you the details.
+- We've created a BBB room for each speaker's live Q&A session. The
+  URLs are in conf.org in the private repository if you need them.
+- We've drafted some documentation for different volunteer roles. If
+  you'd like to volunteer as a captioner, check-in person (hmm,
+  reception?), Etherpad scribe, IRC monitor, or host, please check out
+  the appropriate link and let me know if I need to add anything to
+  the docs:
+  - <https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/caption>
+  - <https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/irc>
+  - <https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/pad>
+  - <https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/checkin>
+  - <https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/host>
+- Thanks to David O'Toole for signing up for some IRC shifts! If you
+  would like to volunteer for a shift, check out
+  <https://emacsconf.org/2022/organizers-notebook/#shifts> .
+- We've updated our streaming configuration for the General and
+  Development tracks, and have started testing them using mpv and the
+  watch pages. Videos aren't currently streaming, but you can check
+  out the layout of the watch pages at:
+  - https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/gen/>
+  - https://live.emacsconf.org/2022/watch/gen/>
+  - https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/dev/>
+  - https://live.emacsconf.org/2022/watch/dev/>
+  These pages could probably be a lot prettier and easier to use. If you have some ideas
+  for improving them or if you'd like to work on the HTML/CSS/JS, we'd
+  love your help!
+- There are now Q&A waiting rooms with friendly URLs so that it's
+  easier for people to join the live Q&A when the host decides it's
+  okay to let everyone in. They're linked on the watch pages (along
+  with the pads) and they'll be linked from the talk pages once we're
+  ready to share them.
+- zaeph has been busy tweaking the ffmpeg workflow for reencoding and
+  normalizing videos. Thanks to Ry P. for sharing the
+  res.emacsconf.org server with us - we've been using it for all the
+  processing that our laptops can't handle.
+- We experimented with using the OpenAI Whisper speech-to-text toolkit
+  to create the auto-generated captions that captioning volunteers can
+  edit. Looks promising! If you'd like to compare the performance
+  between small, medium, and large models, you can look at the VTT
+  files for the sqlite talk in the backstage area. I've also added
+  support for tab-separated values (like Audacity label exports) and a
+  subed-convert command to subed.el, which might give us a more
+  concise format to work with. I'll work on getting word-level timing
+  data so that our captioning workflow can be even easier.
+
+Next week, we hope to:
+
+- improve the prerec and captioning workflows
+- get more captions underway
+
+Lots of good stuff happening!
+
+Sacha