SReview

Production examples

SReview has been used in production for the following conferences:

• FOSDEM: Every edition since the 2017 edition
• DebConf: Every edition since the 2017 edition
• A few mini-debconfs: 2017 Cambridge, 2018 Hamburg, most mini-debconfs since.
• OSW.za: 2019 edition

What follows below is a short description of how SReview was installed and configured for some of those conferences. Note, however, that it is possible to run all components of SReview on a single host; for small conferences, doing so is recommended.

FOSDEM

2017

At FOSDEM 2017, SReview was installed on the following machines:

• review.video.fosdem.org: web interface, postgresql, gridengine master, gridengine exec, dispatch script
• encoder0.video.fosdem.org, encoder1.video.fosdem.org, …: gridengine exec, encoder nodes
• backend0.video.fosdem.org, backend1.video.fosdem.org, …: detect_files, storage for raw recordings (access over HTTP only)
• storage0.video.fosdem.org, storage1.video.fosdem.org, …: NFS, storage for cut_talk, previews, and transcode output.

All machines were “bare metal” machines at a cloud hoster. Data access to the database and the raw files was LAN-based and therefore quick.

FOSDEM 2017 was the first ever conference where SReview was used. The code was extremely rough around the edges; in fact, much of the functionality wasn’t there yet, and much of what was there has since been rewritten.

2018

The setup for FOSDEM 2018 was very similar, but there were a few differences:

• Everything ran from Debian packages, and we used the generic scripts (sreview-transcode rather than a custom transcode script, etc).
• review.video.fosdem.org was renamed to review-master.video.fosdem.org, and a CNAME was created for the former, for more flexibility (which we turned out not to need in the end, sigh).
• The NGinX-mp4 module was not used this time around to access the backend machines, instead we used NFS to access them.

DebConf

2017 (Montéal, Canada)

At DebConf17, SReview was installed on the following machines:

• vittoria.debian.org: web interface, postgresql, gridengine master, gridengine exec, dispatch script with configuration for upload and notification only (upload script would pull from noc1st0 first and then publish).
• noc1st0.debconf17.debconf.org: raw recordings, all intermediate files, nginx (for serving preview files to reviewers), gridengine master, detect_files, NFS server for raw and intermediate files, gridengine exec (for cut_talks scripts only).
• encoder0.debconf17.debconf.org, encoder1.debconf17.debconf.org, …: gridengine exec, encoder nodes.

vittoria is a VM that runs on Debian infrastructure at GRNET (Greece). It is available to the DebConf video team all year.

The other machines were local hardware, borrowed for the duration of DebConf17. They were configured to be granted access to only the postgresql on vittoria.

During the conference, while the talks were in the waiting_for_files through transcoding states, no files were copied to vittoria. Only when the transcodes had finished were they copied (by the uploads script that ran on vittoria) to vittoria, and then pushed from vittoria to the DebConf video archive.

After the conference, all raw recordings were rsync’d to vittoria.

2018 (Hsinchu, Taiwan)

For DebConf18, the setup was very similar, but there was a major difference: rather than having multiple machines on-site, the DebConf18 setup only had one 24-core VM with 10 TiB of storage on-site, storage.dc18.debconf.org. All cutting and transcoding was done on this machine; vittoria served the webinterface and the database, etc.

Mini debconfs

Everything was installed and run on vittoria.debian.org

OSW.co.za

The Open Source Week in Johannesburg, South Africa, used SReview for the review and transcode cycle. Everything was installed on a single machine (from Debian packages) that was only available from the NOC; review was done by a single user. After the first day of this conference, when less rooms were required, we also reused some of the machines that were originally used for recording as transcoding workers.

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