VDD 2023 Dublin Report (en)

Published in

Tokyo Video Tech

7 min readOct 4, 2023

Reported by Takesato Hayashi

Video Dev Days 2023 Dublin (VDD 2023 Dublin), a video technology technical conference organized by VideoLAN, was held in Dublin, Ireland on September 22, 23, and 24. This year’s 2023 conference was hosted by The Sigmedia Group at Trinity College Dublin School of Engineering, after a four-year hiatus from VDD 2019 Tokyo. The previous host city was Tokyo, and I was on the support side from Tokyo Video Tech. This will be my first time attending VDD. I will tell you what it is like to be at VDD, a conference that brings together members of the global multimedia community.

# Place of this year’s host: Dublin, Ireland

My participation was decided a month before the event and I left without much preparation or information gathering. The flight was from Haneda, Tokyo (HND) to Dublin Airport (DUB) via Paris (CDG). The flight from Haneda to Paris took 14 hours and 45 minutes on Air France over the Bering Sea, Greenland, and Great Britain, and from Paris to Dublin took 1 hour and 45 minutes, for a total of 21 hours and 40 minutes including transit time. (The return flight from Dublin to Haneda took 15 hours and 55 minutes.

# My first Gaelic

When I arrived at Dublin airport, the first thing I saw was a sign in a language I had never seen before. This was “Gaelic”, the official language of Ireland, as I was later told by another participant.Gaelic is different from English, which is used in everyday life in Ireland, and is a language of the Celtic lineage.Since English is widely used in everyday life in Ireland, travelers are only aware of it at airports. Because of the prevalence of English, they are trying to increase the use of Gaelic, but I was told that the recovery is not going well, but it is good to see it being used in public places like this.

# Currency and Credit Card Acceptance

The currency is the Euro. Credit cards are accepted by Visa touch from taxis to pubs, so the only time I needed cash during my trip was to buy a drink from a vending machine. (Some vending machines do accept credit cards.)

I knew that the weather in Dublin was already autumn because I came from Japan, where the days were still extremely hot, but I was not well prepared for the cold weather like this and was forced to wear layers of clothes from the next day. In the city, there were people wearing down jackets and scarves.

Day 1: Community Day in Dublin on 9/22

The first day was Community Day, it is one of my favorite activity at the last VDD 2019 Tokyo, where attendees were divided into groups and went on a treasure hunt around the host city of Dublin. Open source projects have always focused on online communication, such as email, but this is a unique activity where members meet and talk to each other in person. Groups hold discussions and work together to solve multiple tasks. This is a great way to activate communication between members, even if they have never met before, and it is a good exercise as well as a great way to get to know the city of Dublin.

At 9:00 am, everyone will gather in the hotel lobby where Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President of VideoLAN, will explain the rules and distribute maps.Groups will be formed on the spot, and after wearing the iconic orange and white cone hats of the VLC media player, we will be on our way.

There were a total of 17 missions this time, and to complete the missions we had to explore a large area of Dublin.By the way, my step count for the day was 27,153 steps and the distance traveled was 9.11 kilometers. At the end of the day, the members were exhausted. Well, that’s true.

During the event, there was a surprise game called “Escape Boat” where participants had to escape from a boat, which was a great opportunity to talk and get to know each other even though we were meeting for the first time.I won’t write the details of the mission here because it would be a spoiler, but I will add that it was very difficult, just like the last time in Tokyo. jb said that he would make it more difficult next time.

In the evening, after a lot of walking around the city, we will meet at the BrewDog Dublin Outpost <https://www.brewdog.com/uk/outpostdublin>, an Irish bar at the Irish brewery. So, we will prepare for the conference starting the next day.

Day 2: VDD 2023 in Dublin at Trinity College on 9/23

The two-day conference begins today. To ensure that participants do not get lost, we gather in the hotel lobby at 8:30 a.m. before heading to Trinity College, the conference venue. The city and campus are very quiet on a Saturday morning, and a group of people in corn hats march to the venue. After registering and receiving our participant badges, we entered the venue, the J M Synge Theater.

The morning session began with an opening talk by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the organizer of the event, followed by an introduction to the host, Trinity College’s Sigmedia <https://sigmedia.github.io/>.
Of interest was a demo movie on the restoration of the oldest video ever made in Ireland. Twenty years ago, they developed a system that automatically removes noise from video using multiple algorithms. These studies were later used in movies like The Matrix and then in VLC Media Player, Netflix and YouTube. He explained how Sigmedia plays an important role in the multimedia field. Then Anton Khirnov talked about FFMPEG CLI multithreading, Christophe Gisquet presented a case study of a web conferencing system implementation using AV1 for screen capture feature in WebEX, Remi Denis-Courmont talked about RISC -V, VLC for Android by Nicolas Pomepuy, and dav1d<https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d> by Ronald Bultje.

In the afternoon, development meetings for VLC Media Player, FFMPEG, and dav1d were held as unconferences. I attended the VLC Media Player meeting.The style of the meeting was that participants first suggested a topic they wanted to discuss, and then the topics were discussed in turn.The meeting was a lively exchange of ideas, and I was impressed by the freedom of discussion and respect for individual ideas in the open source community.

# VideoLAN community dinner

After meeting until after 6pm, the first night of the conference was the much anticipated VideoLAN community dinner.
The dinner was held at The Merchant’s Arch<https://www.merchantsarch.ie/>, a bar on the banks of the River Liffey in the heart of Dublin, where Irish food (Shepherd’s Pie, Sticky Toffee Pudding) and Irish beer (BUINESS, Hop House 13 Lager) were served while watching the 2023 Rugby World Cup on TV.

Day 3: VDD 2023 in Dublin at Trinity College on 9/24

The final day starts at 9:30 a.m. with two Clever talks by Martin Storsjö on LLVM-MinGW, an open source toolchain for Windows based on the LLVM code <https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm- mingw> description.
Mark Shwartzman then presented a case study on the use of FFMPEG in Meta. He said that they will be replacing it soon, and that FLV is being used internally as a data source. I haven’t heard that name in a while. Brings back memories.

Well, then came the Lightning Talks, where a variety of topics were presented in the 5–10 minute time slots we had.

I got the last slot and thanked them for coming to VDD 2019 and told them that the Tokyo team really enjoyed hosting and would like to host again if the opportunity arises.I then said, “If you ever come to Tokyo or want to speak at Tokyo Video Tech, let me know!”.
They said, VLC, x264, x265, dav1d, and FFMPEG developers all had a great time in Tokyo. VDD 2019 Tokyo was blessed with excellent, experienced, and dedicated staff, and we are grateful to our sponsors IIJ, J-Stream, ABEMA, MUX, Mozilla, Videolabs, YouTube, and Forecast Communications. Special thanks to Phil Cluff. Once again, I would like to thank the many people who worked so hard to make this happen.

I would like to take a moment to say thank Jean-Baptiste Kempf of VideoLAN for hosting VDD 2023 Dublin and François Cartegnie and the VideoLAN team for calling me. Thanks to Trinity College Dublin, Sigmedia and Vibhoothi for the great hosting, thanks for so many inspirations, meetings, valuable experiences and a great VDD.