Edeb8's birthday upgrade

So tonight I'm going to share with you all edeb8's newest feature: live debates! I've always wanted to do this with edeb8. The challenges in doing this have been pretty huge, and with me being poor as I am I've had to take a few shortcuts, but it works.

This is a public beta of that feature. The part that's missing is the voting at the end of the debate. So your video will not actually be saved. You WILL actually be recorded, but the recording will not be uploaded to the server (and this is because I'm still working out the most effective way to upload an hour's worth of uncompressed video and audio, which unfortunately I need to do because edeb8 doesn't have a streaming server - and renting one would increase the cost of running edeb8 by roughly $250/year, which I'm too poor to afford). I'll be testing various ways to make that happen, and I've got a really genius idea in mind for how to do it too. (another option, if this fails, would be to stream the debate live and not save it at all. This would be easier, and more like RL debating, but not as ideal as judges would then have to watch at the same time as you debate, plus it's harder for me to moderate.)

In the meantime I'd REALLY appreciate feedback on three things:

1) The connection. Can you chat to somebody? The debate timer won't be perfectly exact but is it acceptable?
2) The interface. Does it look good? Is it easy to use?
3) The set-up options. Can you do the kinds of live debates you want to do? (World first to support Lincoln-Douglas live BTW!)

Check it out at http://www.edeb8.com/live

Tomorrow morning I'm going to be uploading comments on judgments, and the optional ability to hide the names of debaters involved in the debate before voting ends.

admin: PS If you need somebody to try it with, try chatting me to see if I'm on.

admin: Tomorrow morning I'm going to be uploading comments on judgments , and the optional ability to hide the names of debaters involved in the debate before voting ends.
Best update ever. The live debates alone will attract plenty of people to this site (if they know about them). The ability to hide debater names is the perfect way to stop judge bias. My only concern is that the live debate isn't saved. An idea, is to save a compressed video after every round to the server.

I can't give any more suggestions, because I've yet to see how it works.

Pretty cool bro!
My internet cap was reached this month so I've been dropped back to 1995 dial up speed for a couple of days.
I'll help test it later.

Can we schedule a debate tonight? I want to watch a lincoin douglas live debate.
I feel it should be a model for live debates on this site. Oh, and I want to remind admin of this forum.
http://www.edeb8.com/forum/EDEB8.com+Site/444

The first live debate could be a great showcase to show users considering joining this site.

nzlockie: You still have internet data usage plans?

I can enter the live debate, right? I think the best way of preserving live debates is finding a solution with YouTube. YouTube actually allows live video's now, so it is possible that instead of saving video's to the server ourselves, they are uploaded to youtube at the end of the debate, and then saved on the server for people to view.

^ Although I'm still not sure why a debate recording can't be compressed into a video using proper code, it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow the recording to be transferred via youtube. 200$ is to much for a streaming server, but there is little point to live debates if we can't find a way to preserve the video.

Blackflag: It's normal in nz

Blackflag: Youtube allows you to "Broadcast" a live video but there's a lot of limitations on that. It only allows it to "youtube partners" and you can only have 1 broadcast at a time, so you can't broadcast 2 people to each other. The plan is for both debaters to upload their video/audio at the end, then the server mixes it all together and uploads it to Youtube. But basically using YouTube as a streaming server can't work, only as a hosting server.

Blackflag: Compression can only happen fast enough on the server side. I believe somebody did compile ffmpeg to asm.js but it really needs node.js to be efficient. But don't worry, the upload and the fallback should both work.

At present, only the debaters can see the live debate "live". It is a peer-to-peer connection, so adding watchers would multiply the bandwidth. First I need to test the system as it is and see how much bandwidth I can have.

IMPORTANT THING I FORGOT TO SAY: Internet Explorer has some issues I know about so don't use that. It's not my fault - Microsoft says they're working on it but they don't support these kinds of connections either.

admin: The other option I looked into was scriptcam, which does provide a free streaming server for chatting and recording, but stupidly enough can't do both at the same time.

admin: Don't want to bury this thread, but is it possible to embed video's that aren't from youtube? The code I want to use is for debates on radio free europe, and the economist.

Blackflag: On the forums you mean, or in a live debate?

admin: Oh, it did show up. Cool.

So if I understand this correctly, at this stage this feature is basically like Skype, right?

There's nothing to judge because nothing gets recorded and the judges can't watch the debate taking place?
So at this stage you're basically looking for people to use the feature to make sure the connection is working correctly, as well as the challenge-accept and timer aspects?

nzlockie: Yip

admin: coolio.