FLOSS-787

Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 787, recorded Wednesday, June 12th. Video Ninja, it's a little bit hacky.

Hey, this week, Kathryn Druckmann joins me and we talk with Steve Seguin, the creator and maintainer of Video Ninja, Raspberry Ninja, Versus Cam, and the new Social Stream Ninja, it's all about WebRTC and comment aggregation for doing live streaming, it's a lot of fun, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Hey folks, it is time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett. And today as the co host, we have the lovely Catherine. Welcome Catherine.

Katherine: Hey, thank you. I'm glad you pinged me. Thanks for having me again. Yes,

Jonathan: yes, yes. I'm glad to have you back.

The last time we were going to have you on to co host, you sent me a last minute email and said, Oh, by the way. Yes,

Katherine: that is true. I live in Texas. I lost power two times within a two week period. One was about a little over 48 hours, and this last time was about 28 hours. Again, it could have been worse.

It was worse for quite a few other people, but It was kind of rough and difficult to get things done when you don't know if you have power or not, and then you don't.

Jonathan: 48 hours, that is, that is long enough to really sort of make you think about things. Like if power is just off for an hour or two, like it's fine, just try not to open the refrigerator and everything, everything goes, life goes on.

But you get over a 24 hour period and suddenly you start thinking about, What do I do if power's off for a week? Can I survive this? Yeah, yeah,

Katherine: you have to start, yeah, yeah.

Jonathan: What changes do I need to make in my life? What could I do to be more prepared for this? Like, at least for me, when I go through something like that, I immediately start thinking, okay, how can I be better prepared for this next time?

Yeah.

Katherine: Prepper mode, yeah, yeah, for sure. I need more solar panels. And then, I also had a hotel booked, like, and then my power came back on, so. There you go. So I was able to cancel it, but yeah.

Jonathan: Yep, yep, yep.

Katherine: Yeah, that was fun.

Jonathan: All right. Well, we have a, we have a guest today. We're going to talk with Steve, I believe it's Sanguine?

Sagan.

Steve: That sounds good.

Jonathan: Hey, there's Steve. Steve Sagan. And he is the guy behind Video Ninja, which you may remember as OBS Ninja. We'll talk about the name change. And then there's some other newer projects that he's got going on. I want to ask first, Catherine, how familiar are you with this? You said in the pre show that you you use some of these tools for some other things for, for day job?

Katherine: Yeah. Yeah. I, well, so I've, I've used things. I mean, yeah, yeah. I can totally talk about it. Yeah. I know it's something secret. Yeah. I, but I, I, you know, I like to use open source tools where public, where possible. But yeah, I, you know, I, I would, I'm not a I'm not a person who has a lot of experience with streaming video and that type of content, but I have done a little bit of it.

And when I have done it, I have used OBS or, Video or things like that and I you know I'm really excited about this because I would like to do more with these tools And so this is a really exciting opportunity for me to have a conversation about it.

Jonathan: Yes, absolutely So something something that we've been asked about a couple of times is how does the technical side of doing the show work?

And some some know we stream the live video to discord, which is a lot of fun That word fun gets a lot of mileage there because a lot of times it's a, it's pain. So one of the, one of the things that we're going to do today that I think is we're going to talk with Steve, I'm going to give kind of a walkthrough of the technical setup for the show.

And then I'm hoping Steve is going to point out some places where we could do it better. And but let's not, let's not faff about anymore. Let's not. Piddle wasting more time. We got started a little late. So just squeeze every minute possible out of the hour. Let's go ahead and bring him on Steve. Steve Sagan.

Sagan.

Steve: That's fine. Yeah.

Jonathan: All right. Steve Sagan. Welcome sir, to the show.

Steve: Thank you for having me.

Jonathan: And so your claim to fame, at least in this context is it's mainly video ninja, right? Like that's what, that's what most people know, know your work for. Right.

Steve: Yeah, at this point Video Ninja, a little over four years ago, at the start of the pandemic was a pretty popular tool.

It still is. And it is, yeah, it's just only grown since then.

Jonathan: Now, when you, when you first started it, it was called OBS Ninja, right?

Steve: Yep. It was OBS Ninja. That name was picked around 2017. But it kind of infringes on the OBS studio name and also, um, confuses some users thinking that it's affiliated with OBS.

Right. And so changing it to, to video made it more generic cause it doesn't work with just OBS. It works with, with video. virtually any tool for any purpose. So yeah, the name changed to Video, and some people ask, you know, it's, it's V D O as in, and it's a joke on video. If anyone's curious.

Jonathan: Yeah, so, it's, there, there is, there are two, there are two ways to pronounce that V D O, you can spell it out, like a noob, like I do, or apparently, the cool way to say it is you just say the word video, and it's a pun, and it's done intentionally. It is

Steve: a pun, I, I try to emphasize the D a little bit, so it's a little more to the name, but yeah, it's a, it's a pun.

Jonathan: There was something that happened with OBS where some other tool was using the OBS name, like without any permission at all. I think it was a proprietary tool. I don't remember all the details of this, but the OBS crew came out and said, please don't do that. And it was about that same time that OBS Ninja just sort of, yeah, just sort of quietly.

So by the way, guys, we're going to, we're going to rebrand and we're going to, we're going to become Video Ninja now.

Steve: And that was, I think Streamlabs OBS was probably the biggest offender at that time. That's

Jonathan: right. That's what it was.

Steve: So yeah it was time to dodge

Jonathan: change. So give us the, you know, the rundown, like what, why did you pick the OBS name to start with?

What is Video Ninja intended to let people do? What's the, what's sort of the, what, what problem does it

Steve: solve? Well, back around 2017 I was playing video. I'm doing a lot of WebRTC work, you know, VideoNinja uses WebRTC technology, which allows you to do peer to peer in the browser. And OBS has a browser source element, which lets you put webpages into your video stream.

And I noticed that WebRTC was working within that browser source. And it wasn't working flawlessly by any means, but it was working. And I saw that open up. massive potential because it's a lot easier just to put a URL in than configure servers with Nginx and other aspects. So the tool is really focused on being a production tool for OBS initially.

And so that, that's where the name came from. It was meant to be more of a a fun, flexible tool for OBS. I forgot the rest of the question.

Jonathan: What are some of the other problems that Video Ninja lets you solve?

Steve: Well, it's a highly flexible tool these days. So, some people are using it to do podcasts without OBS at all.

For example, you can record within the browser. You can record directly to your Google Drive. It lets you bring in streams from mobile devices without having to download anything. If you have an older device an older Android, it will still work generally with, let's say, Chrome on that Android. It also facilitates peer to peer video, let's say, over your local LAN.

A lot of people are used to using cloud services, but if you have a bunch of cameras in your house and you don't want them going to the Internet and back you can keep all that traffic locally securely private within your own personal LAN, yeah. It does transcription, translation video effects.

Really?

Jonathan: Yeah. I did not know. I did not know I did any transcription stuff. That's cool. I'll have to look into that.

Steve: So, when you're using something like Chrome or Edge, it has a built in API that you do transcription. So you can add closed captioning to all the guests and each guest can have their own label if you choose to.

Jonathan: Nice.

Steve: Yeah, there's quite a few other use cases in this actually, I feel.

Jonathan: So, speaking of other use cases I, One of the open source projects i'm a part of they have an apple, you know, like a an iphone app They wanted to get me as part of testing of that. And so they sent me the the cheapest ipad that you can buy on android but still It's apple hardware.

It's fairly nice and it's so now I suddenly have this big portable screen and It occurred to me that this would be a great teleprompter. So I, I bought a teleprompter kit that sits underneath my camera now. And so I can put the iPad up there and you know, it shows in the, the, the half mirrored glass and I have a nifty I have to nifty teleprompter, but then I, I, I had to solve this problem of, okay, what app do I want to use to be able to hook up my teleprompter to my iPad?

My laptop here to actually be able to record and, you know, scroll through my text as I record. And I found a website that works great as a teleprompter, but I couldn't get the, the remote aspect of it working. And it's like, I kno...