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We are happy to announce Opencast Explore, our new central video hub for all video content related directly to Opencast! This includes conference recordings, webinars, promotional videos, and more. Previously, most of these were graciously hosted by the ETH Zürich in its video portal.

We decided to move all content to a central, community-controlled location without unrelated videos. This not only prevents questions about where to find recordings or webinars, it also allows you to use the search to make it easier to find exactly what you are looking for.

We already have many test instances that function as playgrounds where everyone has full access, but Opencast Explore serves a different purpose: It is a pretty showcase of the two pieces of software powering it, namely Opencast and Tobira. Therefore OC Explore is completely read-only to the public and only a handful of people will actively add & modify content. This also means the Opencast connected to this Tobira is not accessible.

Management of Opencast Explore will mainly be done by elan e.V., with the server being provided by the University of Osnabrück.

Hello everyone,

the Opencast release branch r/18.x has been cut!

The release for Opencast 18 is scheduled for July 24, 2025.

As always, we hope that many people will test this version. Please report any bugs or issues you find.

Best Regards

Release Managers Opencast 18.x
Jonas Dühring
Dennis Benz

The Opencast community is looking for release managers for
the upcoming Opencast 19 release (Feature freeze around November,
release mid December).

Note that the release manager’s job contains very little
technical work. Instead, they mostly focus on motivation and
coordination of the community during the release phase. The
role of release managers is described in more detail in the
Opencast development documentation:

https://docs.opencast.org/develop/developer/#participate/release-manager/

In the past, it has proven good practice to have two people
fill this job as co-release managers to help keep up the
process during vacation, sickness and in case of local
emergencies.

Please apply in this discussion thread, preferably within the next 30 days.

The first roadmap meeting on May 8th allows us to present a draft roadmap for Opencast for the first time in a long time. Or rather: A list of the most relevant projects, ongoing, upcoming as well as planned – and some ideas without an exact plan.

Thanks to everyone who communicated their ideas and projects to the project board. Which is where you find all the contributions, the most important ones though in a nutshell:

Projects, ongoing or upcoming

1. JWT, potentially interesting for all external applications
2. Improve event data model of Opencast
3. ILIAS redesigning their PageComponent-Plugin,
4. Interactive videos in Opencast
5. Tobira: Enable series in Tobira (release v3.3 coming end of May)

(Further) Funding required

1. Chapter editor
2. Paella Player integration into Moodle (and maybe other LMS)
3. Extended Capture Agent API

Ideas

1. Improve live streaming and scheduling

Feel free to contact owners and/or assignees for details or contributions. Organisers David and Olaf will follow up on some of the issues discussed and prepare the next meeting on September 11^th to turn that list into an actual roadmap towards 2026.

If you want to re-visit the meeting, the recording is online with the first couple of minutes missing.

PS: We would appreciate if you would add information according to the template (size of the project, timeline, funding situation etc.) to your issues.

Kudos to Michi from the University of Bremen to organise yet another bug bash for the admin UI in conjunction with a workshop hosted by elan e. V. Check the original post for details. Also remember the call to contribute funding.

With the upcoming Admin UI BugBash on May 13-14, the board would like to invite institutions to contribute to the actual elimination of the bugs we unsurface. Thanks to the generous support from elan e. V. the workshop they organise will provide some ressources to fix issues. But in order to make sure there is sufficient funding, the board is asking institutions to consider supporting further work.

So if you’re about to go productive with the new admin UI, please consider making a contribution and contact the board for details.

We would like to remind you of next week’s Roadmap kickoff meeting (Thursday, May 8th, 3pm UTC, http://meet.opencast.video). Everyone interested in or contributing to Opencast is welcome to participate.

In this kickoff meeting, …:

• we will explain and discuss the idea and components of the roadmap initiative. For more information see the README and the Github project board «Opencast Roadmap» of the Github repository «roadmap».
• we will hear  about and discuss planned and ongoing projects and ideas. Therefore, we kindly ask you to create Roadmap issues. Please provide all information requested in the templates. Only projects/issues represented by an issue in the Github repository «roadmap» will be discussed.

If you have questions in advance, don’t hesitate to contact the current facilitator of the Roadmap meetings (Olaf Schulte, ETH Zürich).

Following an initial talk at last year’s virtual summit, plans for a roadmap meeting were discussed and fleshed out at the international summit in Graz. Participants agreed

• on the rationale of this meeting, both for a more efficient cooperation in the community and the (public) conception of a roadmap,
• the setup of a channel to further coordinate efforts,
• and a Github project to gather,
• ideas, initiatives, and projects to further develop Opencast,
• including sub-projects and modules (Paella, LMS plug-in, Studio etc.)

For more information visit the Github repositories README.

The respective meeting is quartely and we invite everyone contributing to Opencast one way or another to join us for the

Roadmap kick-off meeting on May 8th (3pm UTC).

Feel free to open roadmap issues in the meantime.

Because of you –our amazing participants– and the ever-supportive Opencast Board, the Opencast Summit 2025 at TU Graz was a success. Thanks to everyone who showed up and jumped into talks about everything Opencast, but especially about the current trends in AI, as well as modernising Opencast with the exciting funding chance the Community recently received. Your ideas and energy made it all come together.

It’s all of us who made this event so inspiring. Thank you for being there!

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summit sessions

Tuesday (pre-summit Developer workshop)

Morning Session: Brainstorming	Notes
Afternoon Session	Notes

Wednesday

Welcome by the hosts and the Opencast Board	Recording
Stand-up from the participants	Recording
Opencast in Numbers	Recording
Opencast 17.x	Recording
Opencast Spring Update	Recording
Migrating from Google Transcription to Whisper: Better Subtitles for Less	Recording
Vendor Presentations: Epiphan	Recording
Vendor Presentations: Extron	Recording
Upgrading Manchester from a Very Old Opencast	Recording
Rethinking Recording (- state of the art & ideas for the future)	Recording
Enhancing Opencast content with AI (Whisper + LLM)	Recording
Beyond captions: How AI turns Lecture Videos into Smart Study Guides	Recording
Advances in Paella Player + IA	Recording
Can local LLM co-pilots help with day-to-day OC devops?	Recording

Thursday

First look at Opencast Explore	Recording
Towards a roadmap meeting incorporating the crowd funding campaign	Recording / Notes
Opencast Modernisation	Notes
Metadata + AI	Notes
Monitoring & System Requirements	Notes
Captions & Transcripts	Recording
Introduction to Opencast	Notes
Tobira Roadmap	Recording

Friday

Opencast & Moodle	Recording
AI++	Notes
Editor Improvements	Notes
Can We Remove This?	Notes
Vendors++	Recording
Crash course: OC Compiling/Testing/Reviewing	Recording
JWT	Recording
Publish metadata directly without manually starting the “republish metadata” workflow	Recording
Public Board Meeting	Recording

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Recording Delivery Time

We’re pretty proud of how fast we got the recordings out the door. Here are the numbers: for every 10 minutes of recorded material, it took us about 7 minutes to process and publish… Yep, that’s 0,7 times the session length! Quick turnarounds mean everyone can revisit the great discussions sooner. So, to the next hosts at the University of Manchester: think you can beat our time? We’re throwing down the gauntlet. Bring your A-game and let’s see what you’ve got!
All jokes(?) aside, we’re really looking forward to heading your way next year. You’re going to be awesome hosts!