As board, we talked to several members of the community about projects, efforts, and plans they have for Opencast in the near future, so that we could integrate them into a roadmap we would like to share with you.
Most of these projects are expected to be finished in early 2024 and will likely make it into Opencast 16. However, maybe one or two will make the Opencast 15 cut?
We all know the situation: Someone changed a video title in Opencast and then complains that the player still shows the original title. The answer: Did you run the workflow to republish metadata? Users do not understand that saving a new title is not enough.
That said, is it even reasonable to expect users do understand the additional step required? Looking at how Opencast works and is being used, probably not. That is why we would like to make it possible for Opencast to automatically update the publication when you update metadata or access rights.
This should help users, make editing data faster and lead to fewer mistakes when updating metadata when editing data manually. It should also make integrations simpler since you don’t need to make sure to run additional steps and you no longer have a blocking component (workflow) for updates.
This project is driven by Osnabrück University. Our estimated timeline for this is to have it done by the end of the year.
Update To The Editor
Updating the editor is part of the ongoing crowdfunding campaign. It will fulfil some long-lasting needs: Finally, one will be able to up- and download subtitles in order to use them outside Opencast. Or edit them manually and re-upload them. Also, the “remove all segments” feature and the timeline zoom will become available.
These new features will also be accompanied by a number of fixes to bugs and other issues we have collected lately.
Lifecycle Management
This feature is driven by two requirements: One is to help lecturers use recordings more flexibly: Don’t publish them right away, but at the end of the semester. Or at a given time. Or with a delay to the recording date. In order to serve these requests efficiently and reliably, Opencast requires additional metadata and/or workflows. The second requirement comes from the other end of the publication: Please unpublish (or delete) these recordings at the end of the exam season. Or, from an institutional perspective: Unpublish all lecture recordings two years after they were produced. But inform lecturers in advance. And delete them from the archive after five years. Again, metadata and workflows will help you meet these needs.
Playlists
In Opencast, we already have series to group a bunch of videos and put them (for example) into a course. But this concept is fairly restrictive. What if I have an introduction video I want to put into several series? The answer right now: Upload it to Opencast again or clone it. That’s not a great solution.
This and more has let us believe that it is time to introduce the new concept of playlist to Opencast. Playlists are a list of videos, similar to the same concept on YouTube. This provides an n:m mapping, meaning that every playlist can contain multiple videos, and each video can be included in multiple playlists.
Part of the project is that it should be easy for integrations like LMS plugins (Moodle, Stud.IP, ILIAS) or video portals (Tobira, WordPress) to take these lists and render them.
The project is driven by TU Wien and Osnabrück University. We hope to have this finished in time for Opencast 16 in early 2024.
Integration of Whisper
The idea is to have an on-premise, open source transcription service in Opencast. This is an alternative to the existing integrations with AmberScript, Microsoft and others. As an on-premise solution, this is also more data protection compliant (keyword GDPR).
One part of the project is to have a Whisper integration for both GPU and CPU. This allows institutions – like us at the moment – without GPU server infrastructure to still easily use this feature.
Another aspect of this project is that lecturers should be able to initiate subtitling in different languages via the LMS (we use Moodle), e.g. by starting a corresponding workflow from the block plugin, uploading or downloading subtitles, deleting them again if necessary, or being able to post-process them via the Opencast Editor.
The basis should of course be that the subtitles are saved as tracks, so that it is possible for the lecturers to cut a video and thus also the subtitles, so that they always remain in sync.
Right now, we are testing openai-whisper and whipser-ctranslate2. The latter is optimized for CPU usage. There is already a pull request from Martin (ELAN e.V.) for improving the speech to text engine.
If there are other approaches, like the WhisperC++ pull request, that might be easier to integrate or where the creation of subtitles is faster, we would be happy to hear from you.
The project is driven by HU Berlin and with the support and developed by ELAN e.V. We hope to have this finished in time for Opencast 16 in early 2024.
Remove Solr and New Search
The Solr index is what powers your users’ ability to find videos. Our integration works, but has not been maintained in years, and it is starting to show. With the last round of crowdfunding, we decided to replace the existing Solr implementation with one based on Elasticsearch/Opensearch – the same technology powering the rest of the indexes in Opencast.
The basic skeleton of the required changes is already complete, however there is still work to be done, and extensive testing with real-world data is definitely something we want to do prior to pushing this out to adopters! Because of this we are pushing the target release from Opencast 15, to Opencast 16.
Thanks to funding from the University of Stuttgart, we expect this work to be complete sometime in December for inclusion early in the Opencast 16 release cycle.
Video Portal
The active development of Tobira is currently mostly about many incremental improvements, small new features, and bug fixes. A few notable plans include: the ability to set and modify access permissions (ACLs), to delete videos, and modify metadata of videos, and also to set access rights on pages.
Opencast 