Josh Holtzman will be presenting at Jasig Spring 2010: "Ten Years of Open Source Innovation"
The Opencast Project is a collaboration of higher education institutions working together to explore, define, and document podcasting best practices and technologies. Opencast is building an enterprise-level, easy-to-install open source podcast and rich media capture, processing and delivery system called Matterhorn. The presentation will give an overview of Matterhorn's services, the technologies used to implement these services, and architectural and development principles employed during the first year of development. Some of these services are specific to a lecture capture system, including scheduling and monitoring capture devices. Others may prove useful outside the lecture capture domain, for instance:
- Media inspection (e.g. how long is this video file? what it the bit depth of the audio track?) can be used to obtain valuable technical metadata from existing media archives
- Media analysis (e.g. obtaining text from a document camera via video OCR, or converting an audio track to text) can be used to improve discoverability of media from any source
- Media composition (e.g. trimming, branding, and transcoding audio and video content) can be used by any application that supports audio or video editing
- Distribution (communicating with channels such as iTunes and youTube) can be a valuable abstraction layer on top of the many proprietary APIs for distributing audio and video content.
The Matterhorn technology stack will also be presented, including:
- Distributed OSGi as a means to operate in both a highly scalable distributed topology and as a single, easy to install package.
- POJO services, with JAX-RS (REST) and JAX-WS (SOAP) endpoints
- Integration of 3rd party tools for media processing (e.g. gstreamer, ffmpeg)
