Blog

This year, Pancentric decided to share it’s Christmas Tree with the world. Rather than have a traditional tree in our office, we made a virtual one.

First we commissioned a metalworker Adam Laurence from the wonderfully named “One Little Girl & A Can Of Gasoline” to produce a tree shaped structure. Then we grabbed a bunch of LCD screens from around the office to hang on it. Alex here opened up an old PC and put as many graphics cards as we could in it (who would have thought that it would be so hard to find working PCI graphics cards?) After some swearing and a lot of grief he managed to get x-windows running across all of the screens, (this involved re-compiling the windowing system without xinerama, thank goodness for Open Source and the Freedom to modify). So now we had the basic hardware up and running.

Next, Laco and his gang started work on designing and programming the tree. Working with the geometry of the screens they created a pixel perfect flash animation to run across the 6 screens on the tree!

Of course we weren’t content with just that, so a camera was sourced to put this onto the web. The 1st effort used a standard webcam effort, not good enough I’m afraid, the limitations of custom plugins, and the low refresh rates made it look rubbish.

So, we started again this time with a domestic camcorder, this is connected to a PC and the raw video feed is transcoded into h264 and pumped up to a server on the internet. The server then puts the h264 video into a Flash wrapper and streams it out to the end viewer. If nothing else this was a great proof of principle/concept for us as it means we now have the capability of doing mass video streaming – which is nice.

So all that remained was to record some “fun” clips for out 3pm broadcasts, put the flash in a good looking page, design an email etc. and away we went.

We’ve taken it down now and hope you all liked it.

A Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2009 from us all at Pancentric.