The Art Collider Condensed Documentation

Here you find a quick overview and short introduction to TheArtCollider.

The basic unit on TheArtCollider is a stream (not a file!).

• You can query currently available streams and their meta-data.
• You can view/listen to them.
• You can provide your own stream(s).

Combining the above allows quite a variety of projects. The general idea is that every project has stream input(s) and output(s) ie. you read a stream, process it and send the result on.

However you are not constraint by that. fi. the monitoring system which visualizes data-flow between projects is also just a project processing meta-data from all online sources. Others can only provide streams (eg. Webcams) while yet others only consume information (fi. screenings at exhibitions).

A/V Streaming is based on libre codecs eg. OGG/Theora/Vorbis, FLAC, speex, celt using icecast2 server and is compatible with HTML5 native <video> element. Generic Data can be sent via OSC (opensoundcontrol) and OSCGroups.

The web-based API documentation (query online streams, get previews, etc..) for the stream-listing aka. yellow-pages can be found here.

With Firefox 3.5 (or later) you can directly play A/V. Just click on a stream-URL in the yellow-pages:

• ArtCollider Yellow Pages
• Web Player

See Getting Started on how to connect. Read Icecast2 - Streaming server for setting up your own server.

We provide a couple of tools as well as example code:

..basically you can use any tool that can connect to an icecast2 server. Some of them are mentioned on the General Usage Information page, but there are quite a lot out there.

You should add meta-data to your outgoing stream: ie Author information and Tags so that it’s easy for others to know what your stream is about without actually looking at it.

Icecast2 provides a couple of fields for meta-information:

• Title - project title
• Genre - we use this field for comma separated Tags
• URL - an URL with information about your project. We recommend to use this as “Author” field and point it to http://wiki.theartcollider.org/user/Your_Name
• Description - some text briefly describing your project

Note: Please tag your stream with “audio” and/or “video” so that it’s easy to identify it without checking the content of the stream itself (which is quite expensive in terms of CPU & bandwidth). Example Tags could be “video, live, camera, toilet” or “audio, video, remix, experimental”.

The A/V stream itself provides an additional mechanism for adding meta-data. The OGG container for example has a very flexible system for extra information. Note however, that those annotations are only available once the stream is accessed and are not processed by the monitoring and yellow-pages system (which only reads the meta-data provided by the server).

The dataflow - connections between projects - is detected automatically. Yet, there are some limits to the auto-detection, read more at publishing_connections.