Matterhorn 1.1 Released

We are very pleased to announce the release of Matterhorn 1.1, the second release of Opencast Matterhorn!

Opencast Matterhorn is a free, open source platform to support the management of educational audio and video content. Institutions will use Matterhorn to produce lecture recordings, manage existing video, serve designated distribution channels, and provide user interfaces to engage students with videos.

The release of Opencast Matterhorn 1.1 marks a major milestone in the project, providing a more robust, reliable and scalable system for widescale adoption at institutions. A tour of Matterhorn’s features demonstrates how the system was built to address the needs of users in an academic environment – administrators, learners, and instructors.

Matterhorn 1.1 Features

New in Matterhorn 1.1:

• Administrative tools for trimming media, and for efficiently managing large volumes of recordings, including bulk editing and recording search/filtering
• Administrative access to data about status, performance statistics and technical details
• An improved visual design and user experience for the learner-focused "engage" media player, including the addition of visual "Hotspots" showing most watched segments of video
• For customization and localization, improved REST APIs, and a skinnable media player with pluggable architecture
• Ability to add non-supported capture hardware, improved disaster recovery, and advanced scheduling and ingest capabilities
• For implementors, improved documentation, installation experience, load balancing and support for distributed deployment scenarios

For a detailed list of new features in 1.1, visit the 1.1 documentation in the wiki. These features expand upon the powerful features that were already included in Matterhorn 1.0:

• For learners, a fully accessible media player capable of multiple-stream full screen viewing that creates an engaging and effective learning experience, and integrates easily with existing campus content systems through embeddable media or RSS feeds
• For instructors, powerful media tools that automatically analyze video and extract text, enabling slide segmentation and in-video searching, further reducing the time and effort learners must put in to find relevant content
• For webcast administrators, a sophisticated dashboard enabling complete control over capture, processing and publishing of recordings
• For program administrators, an efficient scheduling tool for future recordings whether ad hoc or repeating for a full semester, as well as a strong API enabling customization for local needs
• For classroom infrastructure, specifications for building a low cost, low power capture devices that supports simultaneous recording of video (e.g. of the lecturer) and VGA output from a computer (e.g. the presentation)

Release Notes and Documentation

All the relevant documentation and information related to the release can be found in the wiki.

Download and Installation

Visit the download page for details on downloading from source or a VM.

Communication/Support

Several communication channels exist for gettings started with Matterhorn. Visit the contact page for details.