[[!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