As we arranged Nordic Championships 2009 in Tampere, we had a simple plan: cover all 18 lanes with webcams, so people can follow the competition live on Internet. All players, all lanes, all shots.
This plan didn’t work quite perfectly, but our webcams showed maybe 70% of all shots played in the competition. It was 70% success, or 30% failure. Depends on how you want to look at it. Visitor statistics of the webcams look like this:
1250 views: webcam to lanes 1 and 15 – 18
1000 views: webcam to lanes 10 – 15
800 views: webcam to lanes 2 – 3 and 9 – 10
400 views: webcam to lanes 6 – 8
100 views: webcam to lanes 4 – 5
How many different people looked at the webcams, is not known at the moment. My guess is somewhere around 250.
Our big plan, showing all 18 lanes in the webcams, worked 100% for some 5 hours only, between 12 and 17 o’clock on Saturday competition day. Two players scored an 18-round during this time, first Peter Nordin and then Karin Wiklund. These might possibly be the first fully televised (or webcast) 18-rounds in minigolf history, including all lanes and all shots. All players of the competition had at least one full round covered in the live webcams, including all lanes and all shots.
Unfortunately we don’t have any recorded videos from the webcams, because we used a free Internet television service Floobs. This free service doesn’t have the option to record any webcam streams. (At European Championships 2008 we had our own server for the webcams, which recorded the videos on hard disk. But that solution cost some money, and now the tournament organization wanted to save that money.)
This is a story of our webcam show, why we succeeded 70%, and why we failed 30%.
Thursday at 16:00 – 18:30
I arrived to the minigolf course, and we checked what equipment we have for the webcam service:
- 3 laptop computers with a wireless 3G Internet connection (low speed, 386 kbps)
- 1 desktop computer with cable Internet connection (low speed, 512 kbps)
- 8 web cameras
- extension cables for electricity
Not much to celebrate in the speed of Internet connections... but otherwise the situation looked good. I believed that this will be an easy weekend.
I made a rough plan where to put the webcams: 3 webcams could easily cover the main area of 13 lanes, but 2 more webcams would be needed to cover the 5 lanes in the narrow corridor and on upper balcony.
Friday at 14:30 – 18:00
I arrived to the minigolf course in the afternoon, after a morning in Särkänniemi aquarium and dolphinarium. For the next three hours I installed webcam drivers to the computers, and taped all webcams to their final places.
One of the laptops, borrowed from a junior player in Finland’s national team, had a virus in the computer. I hoped that it will not cause any problems during the competition. But I was wrong...
Another laptop had very old versions of Windows updates, causing problems with our Creative webcams, which have a better image quality. Updating the Windows would be impossible with our slow Internet connections, so I put a Logitech webcam to this laptop, with poorer image quality. (This was the webcam towards midhill and double hill: website visitors probably noticed that the image quality was poorer than in other webcams.)
I noticed that the only possible place, from where a webcam can fully see all 3 lanes on the upper balcony, is 6 meters above floor level on the rear wall. So I climbed up there. In many sport centers you must pay a ticket to the climbing wall. In Rahola minigolf center you can do it for free. I climbed the first 3 meters with aluminum ladders, and then half a meter more along the wall pillars, until I was able to reach my hands to the optimal position for a webcam. I taped a webcam to the wall pillar, and left it there for the weekend.
My evening, late evening, night, and late night was spent editing player photos for the results service.
Saturday
The competition would begin at 09:00, so it’s showtime! Hope that all computer systems are working fine...
At 08:00 o’clock I opened the website of Floobs webcam service, to start our webcam broadcasts. But the front page of Floobs website gave an error message: the server was totally stuck. It was impossible to start any webcams, but somehow two webcams were still running OK, which were started on Friday. These two webcams covered 9 lanes, 50% of the action on the minigolf course.
Bad luck that Floobs website was stuck exactly when the competition started. But it is not simply a matter of “luck”: it is a fact that Internet companies have minimum working force during holidays, and many companies plan their website repair jobs to weekends and holidays, when a minimal number of people will suffer if the service goes down for a moment.
At 09:30 also the tournament website minigolf2008.com stopped working. I guess that it was a planned server shutdown, to install program updates or something. Quite bad luck anyway for minigolf fans, who tried to find the live results or the webcams.
The results service worked OK all the time, as it was on a different www.mrs.fi server. But the photos in the results service are stored at minigolf2008.com website, so the results page showed broken squares in the place of photos, during the time when minigolf2008.com website was down.
Somewhere around 11 o’clock all servers and websites were finally working OK. But our user accounts for Floobs website were mysteriously stuck, so we needed to register more user accounts, to get all webcams running. Each user account can show only one webcam, and you need a unique e-mail address for every user account. So we wasted quite much time finding more unique e-mail addresses for new user accounts, when older accounts got stuck. (The registration process requires clicking a link in the registration e-mail message, so the e-mail addresses must be real.)
The Floobs webcam service is “beta version”. Now we know what the term “beta version” means: nothing guaranteed, try freely at your own risk.
After 12 o’clock we had all 5 webcams broadcasting: all lanes, all players, and all shots. Two main webcams were broadcasting quite good quality, at 400 kbps speed. One webcam was broadcasting poorer Logitech quality at 400 kbps speed. Yet one more laptop on the rear wall was broadcasting two webcams with poor quality, at 200 kpbs speed (as the laptop had a 386 kbps Internet connection, so it was impossible to broadcast two webcams with any better quality than 200 kbps).
Sunday
At 07:00 o’clock in the morning I was reading e-mail with my laptop, at home. The computer gave a virus alert (possibly infected from the laptop of our junior player, through a USB memory stick that was used in both computers). Virus alerts come and go, so I believed that everything is OK.
At 08:00 o’clock I checked that our three main webcams are running OK. One of them needed restarting. After this the 3 main webcams worked as expected, showing all action on 13 lanes of the minigolf course.
Then I started my own laptop, which was supposed to serve 2 webcams on the rear wall. But the computer didn’t start properly. Windows was somehow running, but the screen was totally empty: no desktop icons, and no Start navigation bar on bottom edge of the screen. Great... what next?
Some Google searches with another computer, with search words like “Windows XP desktop does not start”, found discussions were experts suggested restarting the computer in Safe Mode, and then using System Restore to return to an earlier version of the Windows system, which is functioning OK.
I did so, but it didn’t help.
More Google searches found more discussions, where other experts explained that the virus is blocking the program C:\Windows\explorer.exe from running, which creates the Windows desktop. Solution: copy explorer.exe with some other filename, for example C:\Windows\exp.exe, and then change the Windows registry to use the new copied file as the engine for Windows desktop.
With detailed instructions given in the expert discussion, I managed to do this trick, and voilá the Windows desktop started working again. So I climbed on the rear wall with a 3 m long aluminum ladder, connected my laptop to the 2 webcams, and tried to start the webcams. But as I entered Floobs website and tried to select a webcam, the Internet browser crashed and was shut down. I tried different Internet browsers, but nothing helped.
So I left only one webcam running in Floobs service (towards the 3 lanes on upper balcony): the default webcam, which was selected automatically. It was impossible to start the other webcam (towards lanes 4 – 5), because all Internet browsers crashed when trying to change the webcam.
Some more Google searches found the reason for this problem: Floobs website uses Flash technology, and some versions of Flash have a bug that crashes the Internet browser, when the user tries to select the webcam. Originally my laptop had a newer version of Flash, which doesn’t have this bug, so we had no problems broadcasting two webcams in the same laptop on Saturday.
But on Sunday morning I restored my Windows to an earlier version, while solving the virus problem. The earlier version included this Flash bug, so choosing two webcams was suddenly impossible on Sunday. I cancelled the 5th webcam, which would have shown only 2 lanes with poor Logitech quality. We continued broadcasting 4 webcams, which covered 16 lanes of the minigolf course.
At 15:20 o’clock, during the last final round, I looked restlessly at my watch, as the last group was playing lane 4. My weekly hobby session of floor hockey (floorball) would start at 17:30, in my home town 180 km north of Tampere. I felt that I have deserved a game of floor hockey. So I climbed on the rear wall with the aluminum ladder, shut down the webcam for lanes 6 – 8, and took my laptop down from the wall. If any website visitors were trying to watch this webcam, they lost the action of two last playing groups on the 3 boring lanes of upper balcony.
As a courtesy to other members of the organizing team, I also climbed to take down the webcam that was taped 6 m above floor level. Then I packed my luggage, said hello to the leader of organizing committee, and drove like mad 180 km north, to get some quality time with a sport that I love.
This was a lucky gamble: I hoped that there will be no sudden death play-offs in the tournament, which might be decided at lanes 4 – 8, which were not covered by the three webcams still remaining in the hall. I won the bet: all medals were decided without tied scores and sudden death play-offs.
But in reality, this was not a matter of luck. If a sudden death play-off had continued to lanes 4 – 8, it would have been simply a matter of some person in the hall taking a webcam laptop in his hands, and following the playing group as it continues to lanes not seen in the other webcams.
It is possible that nobody would have done so. In that case, we have yet something to learn. Something to prepare better and arrange better in the future.