this is a friendly reminder to join us for the 2024 Opencast Virtual Summit, taking place tomorrow, November 27, 2024.
This online event is an opportunity to connect with the Opencast community, learn about updates, and gain an introduction to Opencast. It’s designed as a supplement to the February in-person summit in Graz, Austria, and is perfect for those who cannot or prefer not to attend the in-person event.
The board invites you to join the 2024 Opencast Virtual Summit on November 27 (US morning, European afternoon).
This meeting serves as a supplement to the in-person summit, offering an introduction to Opencast, community updates, and an opportunity for those who cannot or prefer not to attend the February Summit in Graz, Austria, to meet online.
RPM and Debian packages as well as container images will be available soon. Watch for announcements on the users list. Please consider upgrading soon to the next major Opencast releases.
Thank you to all users, adopters, and developers for contributing to the Opencast project. We hope the next releases go as smoothly as Opencast 14 did.
We want to thank our hosts in Zaragoza at the Vice-rectorate for Digital Education and Continuing Education, and particularly to Javier Fabra (Director of Development and Digital Transformation).
We have a matrix channel to communicate about the summit
Welcome (15 min) – Olaf Schulte, ETH Zürich / Zaragoza University
10:15
Introduce you and your Opencast (30 min) – Everyone
10:45
Opencast in numbers – Katrin Ihler, ELAN e.V.
11:00
Opencast 14 and 15 releases and roadmap (30 min) – Waldemar Smirnow, ELAN e.V./ Stefanos Georgopoulos, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg / Berthold Bußkamp, ssystems GmbH / Lars Kiesow, Osnabrück University
11:30
Coffee break (30 min)
12:20
DigiRepo: An Open Repository of Digital Resources for Universities (30 min) - Javier Fabra, Universidad de Zaragoza
12:45
Manchester Lecture Capture Service – A Year in Review (30 min) – James Perrin, University of Manchester
13:15
Opencast Camera Control (15 min ) – Lars Kiesow, Osnabrück University
13:22
Opencast “On Air” (15 min) – Lars Kiesow, Osnabrück University
13:30
Lunch (1h)
14:30
Tobira update (15′) – Olaf Schulte, ETH Zürich
14:50
Cold-Archiving Opencast Videos – How to get rid of old Opencast videos without really getting rid of them (15 min) – Rute Santos, Harvard University (DCE)
15:15
Coffee break (30 min)
15:45
Ask me anything (about Opencast) (45 min) – Katrin Ihler, Waldemar Smirnow,bothELAN e.V.
16:30
What do we do with the new admin interface (30 min) – Veronika Schröer, Universität Konstanz
17:00
Rebuilding the Search Service (30 min) – Greg Logan, Logan IT Enterprises/Opencast
18:30
Social Event – Guided visit to Zaragoza(Meeting point in the Tourist office in the Plaza del Pilar square)
20:30
Dinner at Gran Hotel Zaragoza
Thursday, March 14
09:00
Opencast User Statistics with Matomo (30 min) – Sascha Nösberger, University of Bern
09:30
Paella Player 7 Update (30 min) – Carlos Turró, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia
10:00
Adopting the YouTube IFrame Player API for the Paella Player (15 min) – Karen Dolan, Harvard University (DCE)
10:15
Crowdfunding project: Opencast life cycle management (15 min) – Olaf A. Schulte , ETH Zürich / Lars Kiesow, Osnabrück University / Waldemar Smirnow ELAN e.V.
10:30
Live Release of Opencast 14.10 (30 min) – Waldemar Smirnow ELAN e.V. / Stefanos Georgopoulos, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
11:00
Coffee break (30 min)
11:30
A subtitles survey at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (15 min) – Stefanos Georgopoulos, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
11:45
Having fun with OC transcriptions and AI (15 min) – Carlos Turró, Miguel Escriva , both Universitat Politecnica de Valencia
Welcome: Kick-off with greetings and an overview from the Opencast Board and host University.
Introduce you and your Opencast : A call to share your Opencast setup insights, showcasing the unique implementations and experiences within the community.
Opencast in numbers : Highlighting key Opencast statistics from the past year.
Opencast 14 and 15 releases and roadmap : Brief on the latest Opencast versions, 14 and 15, including updates and the 2024 feature roadmap.
DigiRepo: An Open Repository of Digital Resources for Universities: DigiRepo is a project aimed at creating an open repository for digital production generated from universities. Relying on an architecture based on OpenCast, which is modular, flexible, and scalable, it will build a repository of enriched and multimedia content, open educational resources, resources for open training, etc. Additionally, it will feature integration capabilities of the content with third-party or external tools. The implementation of an intelligent and efficient search engine using catalog and metadata techniques will be carried out, with special emphasis on its integration with various Learning Management Systems (LMS) following a service-oriented approach through the development of an open API.
Manchester Lecture Capture Service – A Year in Review: A look back at the significant events in running, maintaining and developing a large lecture capture service through 2023.
Opencast “On Air”: At Osnabrück University we implemented a digital sign showing users the capture agent status to make them more aware of active recordings. This will work for any capture agent.
Opencast based camera control: At Osnabrück University, we implemmented a tool to control PTZ cameras based on Opencast recordings to move to certain presets when starting a scheduled recording.
Tobira update: The bi-annual update on the video portal Tobira! What happened in the past year and what are our plans for 2024?
Major Changes Upcoming in Opencast 16:
Cold-Archiving Opencast Videos – How to get rid of old Opencast videos without really getting rid of them: Harvard-DCE has been using Opencast since 2015. Over the years, we’ve accumulated a lot of metadata and video content in our production Opencast instance. This impacts performance of some admin ui screens and when/if re-building the search index. It also costs money. In this presentation, we are going to describe our solution to offload videos to AWS S3 Glacier storage, delete them from Opencast, and retrieve them back if necessary.
Ask me anything (about Opencast): About an hour where people can ask anything they want to know about Opencast and Opencast DevOps related topics. Questions about the basics (“What is a media package”) are explicitely encouraged, there are no stupid questions. Wouldn’t mind doing this with someone else.
What do we do with the new admin interface: A discussion about the Opencast new Admin interface.
Rebuilding the Search Service: We have (finally) replaced the Search Service, come learn about the upcoming changes in Opencast 16.0
Thursday, March 14
Opencast User Statistics with Matomo: How does Matomo work? Experiences so far at the University of Bern. Are the statistics accurate and how can they be improved?
Paella Player 7 Update: In this session I will present the new features added to Paella player since the 2023 summit. Also there could be time to discuss roadmap or further improvements with the community
Adopting the YouTube IFrame Player API for the Paella Player: The YouTube IFrame Player API is a popular reference that allows you to control an embedded YouTube video on your website using JavaScript. We wanted the flexibility to embed and control Opencast videos in the same way as we do for YouTube videos. Adopting the YouTube IFrame Player API and implementing it for the Paella player gave us the common interface for both players. This talk will describe the implementation details, issues, and benefits.
Crowdfunding project: Opencast life cycle management :
Live Release of Opencast 14.10: We’re set to debunk the myth that live demos are risky by releasing the next minor version of Opencast 14 in real-time. Expect a daring mix of courage, boldness, and live maven building.
A subtitles survey at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg: In February 2023, the video portal of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) achieved a significant milestone together with High Performance Computing Department to transcribe with Whisper all existing videos. Since this initial effort, all newly uploaded videos have continued to be transcribed using Whisper. Approximately five months later, we conducted a small online survey over a period of four weeks, targeting both students and teaching staff to gather feedback over the subtitles service. In this presentation, I’m going to share what we found out and what we learned.
Having fun with OC transcriptions and AI : Nowadays, it is very easy to get transcriptions within Opencast. On the other hand, all the new AI tools deal with increasingly large amounts of texts quite easily. So, we have been testing several prompts to get secondary results from transcriptions and also thinking about new features that could improve Opencast. The session is meant as a lightning talk, but could be upgraded to a full session to allow participation of people and/or make a short introduction to AI and Opencast
Vendors Showcase (Extron, Epiphan, ELAN e.V., tales.media)
Empowering MOOCs with Opencast – A Leap Towards Data Privacy and Enhanced Efficiency: Focusing on the deployment of Opencast for iMooX (imoox.at), this presentation outlines our approach towards achieving data privacy and enhancing video hosting capabilities beyond YouTube’s offerings. By collaborating with ELAV e.V., we’re expanding the Moodle integration with Opencast, including features like batch video uploads and H5P content support. We’re leveraging Opencast’s customisation options, such as Themes for video branding, and integrating an on-premise Whisper service for generating high-quality, automatic subtitles. The objective is to attain platform independence, incorporate advanced functionalities, and streamline the educational content delivery process, demonstrating Opencast’s potential in creating a secure, efficient, and feature-rich MOOC environment.
Update to Moodle / ILIAS / Stud.IP Opencast plugin
Opencast: Quo Vadis? — Time for an overhaul? : At this point, Opencast is well over 10 years old. This birds of a feather is an invitation to critically reflect, both technically and didactically, on the current state of Opencast under today’s requirements. What challenges is Opencast addressing well; what can be improved? Where do we need to think outside the box of Opencast’s current approaches? How do you see this space evolving in the future?
General Overhaul of Opencast: With larger funding options that could come up, my intention is to start a discussion on which larger improvements to the code base would be desirable in a 5 year project.
Friday, March 15
Video Streaming 101: In this introductory session we will explore video streaming of both VOD and live content. What are current approaches for video delivery? How to optimize videos for streaming? What protocols exist for different use cases? What about low latency? Finally, how can this be applied within Opencast.
Opencast Maintenance Contracts as an option for continuous funding: For a secure and reliable Opencast software a sustaninable funding is very important. The current options to sponsor Opencast are not good to “sell” at their institutions. On the Bern conference the idea of an maintenance contract came up. There are now concrete suggestions on such a contract that we would like to discuss with the community.
AMA aka “Ask my Everything” Strikes back : Another hour where people can ask anything they want to know about Opencast and Opencast DevOps related topics. Questions about the basics (“What is a media package”) are explicitely encouraged, there are no stupid questions. Wouldn’t mind doing this with someone else.
World Cafe: Discussing issues in small table groups.
Board Meeting: Discussion with Opencast Board
Community Meetings (DACH, Spanish, …): Community Meetings Across Diverse Language Groups (DACH Region, Spanish, and More): Engaging Multilingual Communities
Opencast 