Christopher Brooks Institution Lead, University of Saskatchewan Matterhorn Product Owner, Capture Agents & Administration Tools

Mid-sized Canadian University (~18,000 undergraduate students) Researcher in the Advanced Research in Intelligence Educational Systems (ARIES) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science “Product Owner” for the Capture and Administration teams – Focused on issues like scheduling, monitoring, and hardware/software for capture Like many of the institutions involved in Matterhorn, we rolled our own Where am I from?

Opencast A community of 200+ institutions; higher education, industry, and non-profit all interested in podcasting solutions A group of 13 universities participating in a Mellon & Hewlett funded build project: Matterhorn A selection of regional organizations (base camps) showing off and sharing their experiences with the Matterhorn “product”, from 0.5 (January) to 1.0 (July)

Matterhorn: 10,000 foot view Orgzonas The CobblerThe Sophisticate Already podcasting, but using a mix of technology to do so (often home brew) Small team, minimal support Wants to offer more recording options, and to move towards automation Scalability is the pain point Lots of podcasting already happening with a single tool Deployment to external facing sites, iTunesU or YouTube Want deep integration with campus systems (scheduling) Movement towards HD capture and dynamic tracking systems Editing of recorded lectures in-browser would be nice Have the capacity to modify a project to customize it to the local setting

Matterhorn: Component Overviews

Matterhorn runs in an OSGi environment – Components can be deployed in one container, or multiple (distributed containers) – Each service maintains Java OSGi, REST and SOAP endpoints (where reasonable) – Underlying implementations are done in Java Some platform specific code, *nix Version 1.5 or 1.6 – Nightly example: Service Oriented Architecture Approach

Codecs & Playback Capture codecs for 1.0 – H264 in MP4, or MPEG2 in MP2PS – AAC, MP3, or MP2 audio – Uses the gstreamer framework underneath – Bit rate can be cranked up or down depending on hardware Processing – H264 encoding, potentially FLV – Uses the ffmpeg engine underneath Playback is through a flash streaming server – Red5 open source server out of the box – Wowza, FMS, should all be options – Content is H264 in MP4 container

The back end defines workflows in an XML format How should we best make this available in the UI? Workflows for Customization Transcode and Distribute A simple workflow that transcodes the media into distribution formats, then sends the resulting distribution files, along with their associated metadata, to the distribution channels. <operation name="compose" fail-on-error="true" exception-handler-workflow="Default Error Handler" description="Encode media"> track-1 track-2 <operation name="distribute" fail-on-error="true" exception-handler-workflow="Default Error Handler" description="Distribute media to distribution channels"> track-2 <operation name="publish" fail-on-error="true" exception-handler-workflow="Default Error Handler" description="Add metadata to the search index" />

For version 0.5 we are encouraging testing as a virtual machine – A script that creates Ubuntu 9.10 virtual machines will be made available – A VMWare Appliance that offers “3 click install” for any platform* will be available – Some interesting questions around licensing for H264 patents/etc. – Saskatchewan Base Camp A Dual quad 5500 Xeon’s with 12 gigs ram, 1TB drive Running 4-8 vms depending on load and requests Deploying in Virtualized Environments

The Capture Agent Not only is it software, but it’s a hardware reference implementation Requirements (in some order of priority!) – Stable – Cheap (£500 - £800) – Powerful “enough” – 1 VGA + 1 NTSC/PAL mm audio No SDI for high definition in 1.0 No balanced audio inputs directly – Runs on a variety of hardware – Platform independent*

Hardware Solution Dual core Atom 330 running on Intel D945GCLF2D

Hardware Solution Casetronic C137 Mini-ITX Case

Hardware Solution Epiphan VGA2USB

Hardware Solution Video Capture Card – Hauppage PVR350 – PV-143 (BT878) – Ncast – Osprey

Discussion Year 2 Grant; Requirements & Partners – Mobile, live streaming, archival, editing, etc. Comparison to commercial solutions – Echo360, ePresence, Accordent, Podcast Producer, etc. Thoughts on Steeple – Metadata and archiving – Pedagogical practices and efficacy – /contrib/… – Portal(s)