A discussion the other day made me remember some of the demoparty stream “first” that I'm still proud of, most of which still haven't been matched:
- Live voting user counts during the compo (example, at the bottom). A combination of gamification and deliberate peer pressure; if you see that others are voting, you'll feel compelled to follow their example. (The counter would never go down during a compo, only up, even if people stopped adding new votes. Also deliberate.)
- Locking the frame rate to the compo machine throughout the entire chain; in practice, this means that oldschool demos would come in 50 Hz and newschool in 60 Hz, creating a fully VFR stream. A pain during switches, and YouTube messes it up and makes the entire file a bit choppy, but so cool. If always wanted it to do the infamous 50.12 Hz from C64, but never really figured it out.
- And last but not least, the “Eurovision” effect. Don't remember which entry was which during voting? No problem, we wget a 10-second sample (the advantage of having software video mixing for the bigscreen!) during the compo, furiously transcode it to something reasonable on an Arm thingie, and then put a loop of all of them together at the end of the compo. (A glimpse of an example)
Oh, and we streamed the street basketball compo, of course. Through a terrible, terrible video chain that made everything choppy. Would do better if I ever did it again :-)