It's day 2 of DebConf and dvswitch is being used by many members of the video team. So I have a pretty good idea of what it does well and what I need to fix in it.

The most serious problem is that there's no way to start and stop recording from the GUI. That's actually controlled by starting and stopping the file sink, which runs on a remote machine. Here I have arranged to start it by running a command with ssh in the background, which is stopped by quitting dvswitch or with pkill! The result is that we can record a lot of junk between events, which has to be checked and then discarded, or alternately stop recording and risk missing the next event.

Also, we like to number our cameras: 1 for the speaker, 2 for the audience, 3 for slides. But dvswitch assigns numbers to sources in order of connection. I fudged around this by again using ssh to start the sources in the proper order after dvswitch.

Despite these and a number of other flaws, it seems that several people have been impressed by the ability to cover talks from multiple angles. I hope this will attract more people to contribute to dvswitch so that it can serve DebConf and other conferences better.