Matterhorn Project > Matterhorn Overview > Opencast Matterhorn Release 0.5 - Start Climbing!
Opencast Matterhorn Release 0.5 - Start Climbing!
We are very pleased to announce the release of Matterhorn 0.5, the alpha version 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 educational videos. The 0.5 alpha release offers institutions and individuals a preview of Matterhorn's functionality, namely:
- the basics to capture, encode, distribute, and play media
- accessible media player and its unique html/js/ajax and flash hybrid architecture
- administrative lecture capture tools
- lecture capture automation
- rss/atom feed catalog
- inexpensive media capture appliance
- workflow flexibility
With the release of 0.5, the Opencast Matterhorn Project has decided to share Matterhorn with the Opencast Community at an early stage. Our belief is that Matterhorn is the Opencast Community's product, and it should be in your hands to experience and improve upon from the beginning. We welcome your input whether it be a complement, a comment on missing features, a bug entry, or a software patch. This alpha release does not contain the full array of features promised in 1.0 (https://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/Road+Map), but it provides a significant preview of things to come.
Starting in the classroom, you can access a virtual capture agent to record lectures, schedule reoccurring events and monitor the status of capture devices; alternatively, you set up your own capture device or make use of hosted capture agents. The administrative tools allow you to ingest existing videos as well to incorporate digitized media or customized video productions. Matterhorn's out of the box distribution channel offers an rss/atom catalog to enable the generation of custom rss/atom feeds as well as embeddable video.
Download and Installation
To provide adequate access to 0.5, we have arranged for a number of different installation options:
- Download Matterhorn 0.5
- Install Matterhorn from the source code,
- Use Matterhorn's virtual machine distribution.
- Test on a hosted Matterhorn installation at one of five base camp institutions.
Communication
If you need help installing Matterhorn, we have provided several communication channels:
- The Opencast Community List is a great place to ask installation questions, general questions about Matterhorn's features, or anything else related to Matterhorn. To get started just subscribe to the community@opencastproject.org mailing list and send out an email. You'll find many people there happy to help you.
- The IRC chat group #opencast on irc.freenode.net is by developers to communicate about low level technology issues. This group is an excellent place to ask specific technical questions or to get immediate help on something that is blocking you.
Documentation
All the relevant documentation and information releated to 0.5:
- Comprehensive FAQ - worth reading to learn more about the installations options and many other topics.
- Quickstart to installation and configuration.
- Cookbook to help get your hands dirty developing and configuring Matterhorn
- Once Matterhorn 0.5 has been installed, the welcome page will guide you to all relevant resources, including the introductory video.
Bugs
As with any alpha release, Mattherhorn has bugs. Some of these problems have already been addressed, some have been entered to be addressed, but there are likely others that are unknown to us. Please do not hesitate to enter a bug in Jira and/or fix it yourself! Instructions on how to enter bugs and submit patches for 0.5 and trunk are available in the Release 0.5 FAQ.
A few known issues:
- Admin manual ingest page indicates that only media with video can be submitted, but audio only files are supported too.
- Capturing and All recordings filters do not work, but the capture status page provides capture status for current recordings.
- Sometimes the demo capture agent fails to capture scheduled events. A simple Matterhorn restart will fix this problem.
- Scheduled recordings do not retain user entered metadata. Instead the recording uses canned metadata and media provided by the demo capture agent.
Release 0.5 Open and Closed Bugs (indicates issues addressed in iteration)
Iteration 8 and 9 Tasks (indicate issues addressed month after 0.5 release)
