Damn those are some good points, your long term experience and success rate is fairly incredible. I also agree that we shouldn't move forwards without a do-it-yourself option for Matterhorn, it's half the fun : )
However the reference agent seem a bit developer focused? I don't think I could get our AV staff to be effective happy looking after something with this UI [1]. So shouldn't we be looking to put in a lot more development work to keep pace with the rest of the market or remain a solution that's unappealing to institutions who would be capable of running it on the dev side but not the AV ops side? [1] http://opencast.jira.com/wiki/download/attachments/26575033/AlsaPlaybackScreen.png?version=1&modificationDate=1331740619375 Stuart Phillipson | Media Technologies Coordinator Room 1.023 Devonshire House University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom e-mail: stuart.phillip...@manchester.ac.uk<mailto:stuart.phillip...@manchester.ac.uk> Phone: 016130 60478 On 5 Feb 2013, at 19:46, Christopher Brooks <cab...@mail.usask.ca<mailto:cab...@mail.usask.ca>> wrote: I'm not in favour with this proposal for a number of reasons, but I hesitate to vote against it because if this is where the community wants to go then I won't stop it. Here are some of my problems with the #proposal: 1. If we do not have capture agent code that works then we no longer have an end to end lecture capture solution to provide. Mara used to use the term "soup to nuts" for this, and I believe it was one of the strongest aspects of Matterhorn at the time -- there is no open source project that can claim this. Dropping the capture agent is a bad strategic decision to me. 2. If the bugs are all related to installing on new OSes we can just not support those OSes. This isn't a software bug, it just means more manual configuration, and thus we have to write documentation. The capture agent does not have to run on someone's favourite OS, it can run on an older one without compromising our overall project. We don't have to kill the dog because it has fleas. 3. If the issue is hardware we can just change the reference hardware page to list minimum specs. I'd prefer to see an institution contribute a known working hardware profile, but if no one wants to do it then lets just list minimum specs. Any modern hardware other than an atom (and maybe even that now) can run the CA. 4. It is inappropriate to point people to a particular vended solution regardless of whether it is open source or not. Why would other vendors participate in the Opencast project if we just tell people to go buy solution X? I'm all for promoting vended solutions, but I am not for preferring one over another in this fashion. In short, the vision of Opencast Matterhorn as a community managed lecture capture and media processing platform is one that, I believe, must involve a commitment to capturing video. There are ways we can reduce development time on the CA without killing it off -- reducing reliance on install scripts and instead providing documentation, not implementing features that are risky (streaming, confidence monitoring, etc.), providing testimonials of working hardware configurations as well as minimum specs instead of a reference platform. I hope these issues will be carefully considered before this proposal is enacted. Chris On Tue, 5 Feb 2013 10:55:57 -0600 Greg Logan <greg.lo...@usask.ca<mailto:greg.lo...@usask.ca>> wrote: On 2/5/2013 9:58 AM, Christopher Brooks wrote: None of these are ecl licensed. Why can't there just be many agents? Why don't we just quit determining minimum hardware, and instead just indicate hardware that people have successfully used with the codebase? There's nothing saying people can't still use the reference, just that there's no one on our side ensuring that it's up to date. The issue with not determining minimum hardware is that then people will attempt to use the CA on underpowered hardware (atom boxes, and mac minis come to mind) and then yell at us when it doesn't work because we haven't determined the minimum spec. And there has been lots of success with other, non-spec hardware, but I have yet to see any of it put into the lists we already have on the wiki... I don't see a good reason to quit using the reference code and suggest a single vended solution instead. Some are still using the reference code without issue, and while it isn't evolving quickly that isn't preventing the core from evolving. .. The biggest reason is time. We have a limited pool of developer time available, and if those two devs supporting the CA could be better spent elsewhere then it doesn't make sense to keep supporting the reference CA. Don't get me wrong, I don't like dropping the reference CA. But I also don't like that Adam spends his 20% working on CA bugs related to Ubuntu screwing around with package names and removing dependencies when he could be working on something that affects more of the project. And from talking to people at the unconference, there are very very few institutions that even consider the reference build when talking about rolling out CAs. G Chris Ruediger Rolf <rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de<mailto:rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de>> wrote: We in Osnabrück have an LGPL licensed alternative too [1], but I did not mention it in this context as we use a different technology stack (Windows) and our project is not complete in features yet (no scheduling i.e.) and not as mature as the Galicaster. And maybe even other open source options may appear in the future? Rüdiger [1] http://zentrum.virtuos.uos.de/therec/# Am 05.02.2013 16:48, schrieb Stuart Phillipson: On 5 Feb 2013, at 15:15, Ruediger Rolf <rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de<mailto:rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de> <mailto:rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de>> wrote: 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. I'd agree with this statement. When we were looking at capture agents we either wanted an off the self product for simplicity or something we could customise to our environment. We ended up going for customisation and Galicaster vs the reference agent didn't even get off the paper stage. Galicaster was and is evolving so much more rapidly, it's a bit more user friendly to noobs and seems to have a much more active community. That said I'm wondering how Teltek would feel about being the only future FOSS offering on the capture agent seen? Stuart Phillipson |* Media Technologies Coordinator* Room 1.023 Devonshire House University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom e-mail: stuart.phillip...@manchester.ac.uk<mailto:stuart.phillip...@manchester.ac.uk> <mailto:stuart.phillip...@manchester.ac.uk> Phone: 016130 *60478* * * _______________________________________________ Matterhorn mailing list Matterhorn@opencastproject.org<mailto:Matterhorn@opencastproject.org> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn To unsubscribe please email matterhorn-unsubscr...@opencastproject.org<mailto:matterhorn-unsubscr...@opencastproject.org> _______________________________________________ -- ________________________________________________ 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 mailing list Matterhorn@opencastproject.org<mailto:Matterhorn@opencastproject.org> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn To unsubscribe please email matterhorn-unsubscr...@opencastproject.org<mailto:matterhorn-unsubscr...@opencastproject.org> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Matterhorn mailing list Matterhorn@opencastproject.org<mailto:Matterhorn@opencastproject.org> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn To unsubscribe please email matterhorn-unsubscr...@opencastproject.org _______________________________________________ -- Christopher Brooks, PhD ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938 Phone: 1.306.966.1442 Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan 176 Thorvaldson Building 110 Science Place Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C9 _______________________________________________ Matterhorn mailing list Matterhorn@opencastproject.org<mailto:Matterhorn@opencastproject.org> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn To unsubscribe please email matterhorn-unsubscr...@opencastproject.org _______________________________________________
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