Author: oaseth

Following the 2022 Opencast summit, the Board followed up on a number of projects, efforts, and plans institutions and individuals presented to integrate them into a roadmap we would like to share with the community.

One major completion of the Opencast ecosystem will be Tobira, the Opencast video portal. Not only because it’s going to become the default distribution/publication channel for Opencast, but because it brings together a number of features end users can use in one place: They will be able to upload videos, produce them with Opencast Studio, share and manage their assets, and edit videos, their metadata, and the subtitles that can be created automatically. Talking of which: With Microsoft Azure, there will be yet another provider you can use for this in Opencast.

With respect to accessibility, all of these tools (Studio, Editor, Paella Player) as well as Tobira itself will vetted for WCAG 2.1 for end users. All of these components will also see design improvements with a UX/UI designer working towards a consistent look&feel.

End users will also benefit from work underway towards high availability: Less downtime when upgrading, higher performance levels, and resilience to failures. Related, efforts are being made to increase the number of automatic tests for developing and building Opencast.

Finally, a dedicated effort will be made to increase security and make sure Opencast meets institutional requirements in this field.

The board is happy to see (and will continue to make) these efforts come together over the next 12-18 months. Feel free to contact us for questions or comments or if you would like to have your efforts towards Opencast featured in the roadmap. Obviously, contributions to the work underway are appreciated, be that in development, testing, or documentation.

Some specific new features we expect:

• New video portal
• New admin interface
• Subtitle editor
• Dark mode in Studio and Editor
• Azure Transcription integration
• Plug-in system
• High-available presentation node

The Opencast Board is happy to report University of Konstanz from Germany has become a member of the Apereo Foundation, thus joining eight other institutions in the project’s funding scheme described at https://opencast.org/sponsors/. Situated spectacularly above Lake Constance, colleagues (re-)joined the community during the Pandemic and were able to quickly set up a local infrastructure for lecture capture and live streaming thanks not least to the community. The board would like to thank University of Konstanz for supporting Opencast in its sustainable development.

The Opencast board is happy to report German software provider ssystems (https://www.ssystems.de/) has contributed a significant amount of money to the Opencast community. It is part of ssystem’s  policy to obtain a “community contribution” as part of the services they are providing to their customers. The Opencast board honours this support and would like to express its thankfulness to both ssystems and their customers.