Media capture and processing

Below are some features identified as important in Media Capture (derived from Requirement Outcomes From Planning Workgroups):

Scheduling Capture

• Automated and scheduled media capture
• Ability to record on demand, no preschedule
• Easy to use, central location to schedule recordings
• Automated course calendar/production schedule
• As an instructor, know if my course is in podcast-capable room

Controlling Capture

• Capture lecture with minimum intervention
• Ability for presenter to control capture (e.g. start, stop, pause)
• Highly reliable capturing
• Flexible, multiple and/or simultaneous sources of capture (doc cameras, smart boards, video)
• Ability to choose type of capture (audio, video, etc.)

Capture/Media Source

• Ability to capture supplemental media
• Ability to upload in batch
• Ability to upload in multiple formats
• Have a master control panel for all capture facilities

System Feedback

• Automated notification when, where capture is not working
• Provide feedback on where in the process content is

Capture Clients

Best Practice Examples

• See this discussion to see how the University of Saskatchewan is planning to implement a capture client in the classroom with Asus computers with q6060 processors, VLC (software, Open Source), Hauppauge Win TV PVR-350 (500$) that meets these requirements:
  • costs roughly $2k USD per (headless) machine
  • single PC solution for classrooms, so the machine should be able to be used by the lecturer as well
  • capture from single VGA source, with the ability to update to a second and maybe third VGA source
  • capture from two NTSC camera sources
  • ability to archive/post process videos as well as stream low-res videos live

• UC Berkeley uses a combinaion of Mac Mini (800$), Podcast Capturer (comes with Leopard Server OS) and Epiphan SGA2USB Base Model (300$).

• ETHZ also uses Mac Minis (800$) and Epiphan LR (800$), HR (1600$) and Pro (2000$). With Playmobil project they use the Unigraf UFG-03 (about 1800$) or the NCast DCC-3.1 (2000$) with industry PCs PCs (Kontron KISS 2U Short 986).

• Osnabrueck uses Hauppauge PVR cards with linux computers and also Epiphan VGA2USB and MEncoder
• Another OpenSource solution that, still under development, is Cupid strongly based in GStreamer libraries

See an interesting post about which one of the Epiphan boards is good enough for classes capturing and a comparison among different grabbing boards.

Cameras

Best Practice Examples

• ETH of Zurich uses the Sony EVI-D100 model and a commercial tracking system from DynaPel
• Universidad de Vigo uses a robotic Sony BRC 300 (3500$)
• University of Osnabruek uses Sony DVI-D70 ($1000) and Sony BRC 300 (3500$)

Screen Capturing

Best Practice Examples

• University of Michigan has been using Profcast for more than a year now
• Osnabrueck uses VNC for screen capturing
• Some discussion about Panopto

Camera Tracking Technologies

Camera tracking supplements the working area of the capture client/agent in that it replaces the person (student) behind the camera to replace it with technology to automatically produce a video of the lecturer(s). To achieve this, there are a number of different technologies (live tracking, post-production) that will be presented and (hopefully) discussed here.

Best Practice Examples

• At ETH Zurich, camera tracking is part of the PLAYMOBIL capture agent.

Media Encoding

What are the legal considerations in using free tools to encode into formats that have royalties attached? What the settings needed to encode media, such as standards compliant mpeg4, that will play back without problems in a large range of players? How good is the performance? (E.g. interlacing and image quality at a given bitrate?)

lame

ffmpeg

Best Practice Examples

• Osnabrueck encode the input into mpeg-4 using VGA2USB and mencoder.
• University of Saskatchewan encoded the input in MPEG-2
• ETH of Zurich uses MPEG4 part 2 but they support multi format (with some limitations) to archive the content in it's native format from the source.
• There's an interesting discussion about wheather is better to capture and store the raw file from the camera or is better to transform it ro mpeg2 or mpeg4:
• Interesting article about witch format to use for audio files.