Hi People: We currently rely heavily on the Capture Agent… Although we want to switch over to a more robust, commercially-supported capture agent, our brief testing with both NCast and Epiphan led us to delay that decision.
It does seem that the cheap hardware from which to build a capture agent is slowly disappearing. :-( Hard to update the OS to a new version when the drivers aren't available. And not much point in updating the capture agent software until drivers are available. We are being squeezed. Maybe time to add a few Galicasters to our mix? I don't really want to change anything, we finally have a reliable system, 25 reference capture agents, all running nicely, pretty much a set-and-forget system. We have passed 1000 captures for the school year, on our way to an expected 1430. Warren (still trying to find robust, reliable and cheap capture agents) On 2013-02-05, at 9:15 AM, Ruediger Rolf wrote: Hi list, I started this discussion on the unconference in San Diego last week and I want to bring this to the Community now. I would like to propose that we discontinue the development of the reference Capture Agent after 1.4. We would not delete the current code from the repo or something like this, bit we will not really maintain the code in the future so that it will be outdated in the near future, because hardware that we recommend is no longer available or interfaces and drivers that we use will change. We will need to create a mockup-capture-agent (a simpler version of the current demo capture agent) that will prove that our API is still working and can be used for integration tests. This Mockup-Agent will probably have no 3rd-party dependencies like the current agents so that it can be installed on any test server. Why should we discontinue the development? Currently only 2 developers are working part time on the CA. We hardly manage to catch up on know bugs. We hardly manage to keep the install scrips up to date with changes that come with new Ubuntu versions. We have not really improved the functionality of capture agent in the last releases. A good example for that is that the CA user interface still lacks any usability. On the other hand we have to compete with other open source implementations of capture agents and the commercial vendors, which improve their software much more rapidly. Especially Teltek's Galicaster is an valid alternative to the reference Capture Agent as it has an open source license too and works on very similar hardware. Most adopters that currently use the reference CA could switch to Galicaster. By switching away from our own implementation we as a community could open up the discussion with the Capture Agent developers about improvements of the Ingest-API. With our own CA we would need to write an reference implementation. Now we would only need to update the Mockup-Agent to test the interface. If we would encounter in the future that we rely too much on commercial partners with their Capture Agents we could always use our old code again and update it again. I would like to know what the community thinks about this proposal? Thanks Rüdiger -- ________________________________________________ Rüdiger Rolf, M.A. Universität Osnabrück - Zentrum virtUOS Heger-Tor-Wall 12, 49069 Osnabrück Telefon: (0541) 969-6511 - Fax: (0541) 969-16511 E-Mail: rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de<mailto:rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de> Internet: www.virtuos.uni-osnabrueck.de<http://www.virtuos.uni-osnabrueck.de> _______________________________________________ Matterhorn-users mailing list matterhorn-us...@opencastproject.org<mailto:matterhorn-us...@opencastproject.org> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn-users _____________________________________ Warren Long Senior Instructional Support Specialist Information and Communications Technology Email: warren.l...@usask.ca<mailto:warren.l...@usask.ca> Ph: (306) 966-5426 <http://www.usask.ca/> [cid:image002.png@01CD22D0.0B536890]
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