Democaster frequently asked questions
From DoWire Wiki
- How do I find a webcast?
Look in the directory by group, search by keyword, or enter the Democast number. Only webcasts produced via this service are listed.
- How do I listen?
Use the media player of your choice to listen to the MP3 formatted audio. You can listen to live and on-demand streams or download past webcast to your MP3 player. You may also listen to the better sounding Ogg audio format with Winamp (Full) and the latest Real player.
- Can I fast forward or jump to a specific agenda-item?
Download the audio file for easiest access. Depending upon your media player you can move around a webcast. Producers have the option of providing time information via an online agenda on the "player" page for a webcast.
- What is a Podcast?
Democaster includes "RSS" or headline feeds. The podcast feed simply embeds a link to the specific MP3 file and your "podcast catcher" program like iTunes.
- How is the sound quality?
Basic. Mono. Like AM radio. It isn't music. We compress the audio to the greatest extent possible that is still easy to listenable. This allows dial-up users to listen to streams, downloaders to receive smaller MP3 files (an hour of our audio is the size of two typical high-quality songs encoded in MP3), producers to webcast from low bandwidth places, and keeps the cost of archiving audio down.
- How big are the downloadable audio files?
Each hour is approximately 7MB. The Ogg files are slightly larger based on our encoding settings, but sound twice as clear.
- What is Ogg? Why should I care?
As an open source-oriented project we also sought use of non-proprietary audio formats. MP3 encoding requires a license for large scale use and installation of separate software for producers. Ogg sounds much better at lower bitrates and we do all our production in Ogg and convert it to MP3 on the server as another listening option. All this helps keep Democaster low cost.
- How do I receive alerts on new webcasts via RSS?
Each producing group as well as each "series" of a group has its own RSS feed. This feed lists the five most recent on-demand webcasts and up to five future scheduled webcasts. You can use a newsreader of your choice including tools like MyYahoo to keep up with the schedule. Also, we encourage producers to maintain their own e-mail alerts/newsletters on their own websites to promote their webcasts.
- How do I synchronize the webcam slideshow with the audio?
Right after you press play on the audio, click on "start slide show." The photos will update based on the number seconds between images as sent by the producer. That might range between 5 seconds and one minute. Images give you a sense of the room.
- Where is the video?
Video is exponentially more expensive to produce, store, and serve. So it does not currently fit with the low cost mandate of Democaster. The benefits report of the UK Local E-Democracy National Project puts the cost of video webcasting per Local Authority with equipment costs, etc. at 20,000 GBP. We built the Democaster platform for less than the 30,000 GBP. Any Council hesitating with webcasting because of the cost of video has no excuse not to start with audio webcasting. Further, Councils that do video webcast their main Council meetings,
- Why is my organisation not listed in your directory? They use webcasting.
- How does my organisation become a Democaster?
- Where do I learn more about Democaster and the Enhanced Webcasting project?