Opencast Matterhorn

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce the Opencast Community, a global community of individuals, institutions, and commercial stakeholders exchanging knowledge about all matters relevant in the context of academic video and promoting projects in this context. It also gives an overview of the most prominent of these projects, Opencast Matterhorn – a community‐driven open source solution for producing, managing, and distributing academic video.Design/methodology/approachThe paper will demonstrate that Opencast Matterhorn is satisfying institutional needs to manage audiovisual content more efficiently as video is becoming a significant resource in research and education. Furthermore, the paper highlights that Opencast Matterhorn as a product and as a project is open for contributions from the research community and provides an excellent environment for the integration of research results from media analysis, multimedia authoring, search technologies, and other related fields.FindingsOpencast Matterhorn provides a scalable open source solution for universities to manage academic video. Its service‐oriented architecture makes it customizable to institutional needs and open for contributions from users as well as media research.Originality/valueThe paper provides an insight to the idea of Opencast, the Opencast Community, and Opencast Matterhorn – and how they will help academic institutions to better manage and exploit the full richness of educational video.

Automating lecture capture using Opencast

“…Opencast was initiated by 13 institutions from North America and Europe to develop a web based open source system aimed at automating lecture recording that would meet common requirements (Ketterl, Schulte, & Hochman, 2010). Opencast runs on Linux which enabled us to choose a fast and lightweight container runtime, Docker.…”

An Interactive Mobile Lecturing Model

“…Many solutions have come up in the form of recording f2f lectures i.e. Podcasts, Opencast Matterhorn (Ketterl et al, 2010), Virtual presenter (Ketterl et al, 2006), OpenEya (OpenEya, 2012), E-Chalk project (Friedland et al, 2004) and Tele-task (Wolf et al, 2010); these solutions solved the problem of lack of persistence (inability to replay the lecture) inherent in f2f lectures, but the problem of unidirectional communication still persist. Students still engage with lecture recordings in a unidirectional manner (one way communication) i.e.…”

“…Opencast Matterhorn an open-source platform is used to produce lecture recordings, manage existing video and serve designated distribution channels. It has the advantage that it offers all the relevant processing functionalities as an integrated whole; which reduces the amount of manual work needed to process media across different sub-systems, thus increasing productivity, reliability and time saving (Ketterl et al, 2010).…”