Ubuntu PPAs, if you are not already familiar with them, are add-on repositories that are maintained by the Ubuntu community (i.e., David Schleef). In this case, this PPA gives you access to additional packages, namely “matterhorn-admin”.

The Matterhorn PPA can be downloaded right here. And Git repository for the packaging is here.

From David Schleef ” My main motivation for doing this is to have a MH server for testing that I can easily install without too much effort to get a running (although perhaps not optimally configured) system. I hope this will be useful to a wider audience, but that will require community input in the form of testing and feedback, as I typically only deal with a tiny fraction of MH.

I plan to periodically upload new 1.4 snapshots.

These packages are for Ubuntu 12.10 (quantal). Now that I know it works, I will be switching over to 12.04 LTS (precise), since I assume anyone who is building a MH server will be using LTS.

Originally, there was a separate matterhorn-capture-agent package, but I dropped that in order to get matterhorn-admin working well. If you want to work on this, let me know.”

As always, if you’re a university or school interested in high-quality lecture-capture, drop us a line. All of our capture agents can operate as stand-alone devices as well as seamlessly integrating with Opencast Matterhorn.

It’s been an inspiring and educational experience working with Diane, Pascal, and everyone at Mozilla who has so generously given their time and advice – especially the much-needed constructive criticism! I’ve been blown away by the energy and ideas of some of the other founders and companies working along side us, and I look forward to seeing the future of their efforts. Open source software is creating a diverse and accessible future for the web,  as applications and usability increase, so will the numbers of people who have access to these services. Photo sharing, music, cloud storage, teleconferencing, and streaming video are just a few of the areas that WebFwd companies are working in. Check out the list of accomplishments, and keep an eye on all of these companies.

Our boxes are compatible with Matterhorn, and also function as stand-alone systems for high quality video capture in the classroom, event center, house of worship, or video content producers.

As always, we had plenty of fun at the GStreamer conference in San Diego – and somehow managed to avoid getting sunburned while enjoying a warm sunday out on a boat. We’re looking forward to the upcoming Gstreamer 1.0 release and continuing to contribute to the community.

Video of the talks are currently being uploaded here,  you can check out Entropy Wave founder David Schleef’s talk (the slides and audio) on our open-source Streaming Server project online as well.

New dual-input C1000 Capture box with Matterhorn integration

We’ve been hard at work at two big development milestones, the first being an enormous firmware upgrade which includes an intuitive user interface, easy log-in with Browser ID/Persona, along with a host of other exciting features.  We are also scheduling client testing of our new product, the Dual-input C1000 capture hardware which showcases both the firmware upgrade as well as seamless integration with Matterhorn.

This box is available with dual hardware or network inputs, options include HDMI and HS/SDI. Captured video can be encoded separately or mixed into a single encoded stream, then can be sent to a streaming server or CDN, saved to disk, or sent to an archived server. In other words, total flexibility for your workflow.

All 1000 Series products now work as a Matterhorn Capture Agent, automatically recording and archiving on a schedule, and uploading recoded video to Matterhorn core for processing. If you represent a university or school already benefiting from the Opencast/Matterhorn system and are looking to bring HD video, multi-input capture, or live streaming (or all three) to your system, contact us right away to schedule a test period of this new product or for more information.

Like our other products, this box outputs up to1080p/30 in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Baseline/Main Profiles, Theora, Dirac and VP8, streaming in MPEG-TS, Ogg, WebM, Matroska, RTP/RTSP, Flash, RTMP with a configurable video bitrate. The administrative interface is based in HTTP/HTTP web interface, REST API and can be run from a tablet, phone, or laptop for ease of use.

What it is?

GSS is a standalone HTTP server implemented as a library.  Its special focus is to serve live video streams to thousands of clients, mainly for use inside an HTML5 video tag.  It’s based on GStreamer, libsoup, and json-glib, and uses Bootstrap and BrowserID in the user interface.

GSS comes with a streaming server application that is essentially a small wrapper around the library.  This application is referred to as the Entropy Wave Streaming Server (ew-stream-server); the code that is now GSS was originally split out of this application.  The app can be found in the tools/ directory in the source tree.

Current features :

• Streaming formats: WebM, Ogg, MPEG-TS.  (FLV support is waiting for a flvparse element in GStreamer.)
• Streams in different formats/sizes/bitrates are bundled into a single “program”.
• Streaming to Flash via HTTP.
• Authentication using BrowserID.
• Automatic conversion from properly formed MPEG-TS to HTTP Live Streaming.
• Automatic conversion to RTP/RTSP (Experiemental, works for Ogg/Theora/Vorbis only.)
• Stream upload via HTTP PUT (3 different varieties), Icecast, raw TCP socket.
• Stream pull from another HTTP streaming server.
• Content protection via automatic one-time URLs.
• (Experimental) Video-on-Demand stream types.
• Per-stream, per-program, and server metrics.
• HTTP configuration interface and REST API is used to control the server, allowing standalone operation and easy integration with other web servers.

•   Switched to using the gst-stream-server library to handle the HTTP user interface and streaming. This library was originally split out of the E1000 encoder software a few months ago and converted to a standalone open-source project.

• Added a live preview image to the Live Edit tab in the administration interface.

• Added support for encoding and streaming in Flash format. The E1000 includes the OSPlayer open source FLV player, which is used in the public streaming interface if only flash streams are enabled.

• In the Server tab, a new option is available that enables or disables the public HTTP interface. This can be used to prevent unauthorized discovery of the streams that are enabled on a server. This switch does not affect the HTTPS interface, which is always enabled.

• One-time stream URLs are now available and are enabled by default. These URLs are created on request for a given stream, and are valid for 5 seconds. Once a viewer connects to this URL, it is no longer valid. This is used to prevent unauthorized access to streams on the server.

• The E1000 can now be configured to push streams encoded in Flash format to a streaming server using RTMP. This can be configured under the Output tab. Flash authentication is supported.