Opencast is an open-source platform for academic video management, widely adopted by institutions for lecture recordings and video production. The project supports a community committed to improving the accessibility and quality of educational media while offering various tools for managing video content. With the upcoming Opencast 2.0 release, enhancements include a redesigned user interface, new HTML5 video player, and improved workflow functionalities aimed at enriching the user experience.

1. Open Apereo 2015
Higher Education ... Open Source in a New Age
Opencast: State of the Project
Stephen Marquard
Opencast Board | University of Cape Town

2. The Opencast Community is…
Universities, companies and people:
• concerned with academic video
• attracted to the Opencast values of openly exchanging
ideas, experience, knowledge and code
• committed to building and maintaining a robust, flexible,
high-quality open source lecture capture and
academic video management solution.
Now also part of

3. Opencast is
A free, flexible, open-source video management
solution to meet the many needs academic institutions
have with respect to video.
Institutions use Opencast to produce lecture recordings,
preserve and manage existing video, serve designated
distribution channels, and provide user interfaces to
engage students with educational videos.

4. Why is academic video important?
Class recordings are highly
valued by students.
Recordings are a safety-net for
students: a second chance to go
over difficult material, or catch up
on missed events.
Video provides an important way
of engaging learners in online and
blended e-learning courses.
But video can be complex to
produce, manage and preserve.
“If the lecturer’s going
too fast through
something you don’t
understand, you can
slow it down. So, you’re
not forced to learn at
the pace of others; you
can fly through what
you find easy and
concentrate on what
you find hard.”
(University of Cape Town student,
May 2014)

5. Beyond lectures and outside education
Opencast is also used for:
Preparing educational content in advance in high-quality
studio environments.
Video recording for formative assessment of student
technique in medical exercises, therapy sessions,
interview techniques, patient interactions and simulation
labs.
Communicating board meetings and special events in
the non-profit sector

6. Who uses Opencast?
Around the
world, with
especially
strong adoption
in Europe.
43 Adopters
with public
information
(May 2014)
30+
commercial
partner clients
http://opencast.org/
matterhorn-adopters

7. Opencast consists of
Board
Committers
Contributors
Community
Commercial partners
Sponsors
Related Projects

8. Archive
LTI, SSO, REST APIs
Capture Agent API
Any
video

9. Project milestones for 2015
Apereo incubation
Almost complete!
Opencast 2.0 code licensed with ECL2, Apereo Foundation copyright
Simpler, better branding and communication
Phasing out “Matterhorn” in favour of “Opencast” as the single brand
Launching a new website and logo soon
Opencast 2.0 comes with a brand new admin UI for a unified look

10. Code
Code governance largely follows Apache model; decisions taken by committers;
committers proposed and elected
Code in bitbucket (using GitFlow branching model), issues in JIRA
Detailed development process
https://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/Development+process
Pull requests with strict peer review
http://pullrequests.opencast.org/
Successful transition to date-driven releases (major release every 6 months)
1.6.x released Dec 2014, 2.0 scheduled for June 2015; 2.1 scheduled for Dec 2015
Feature Roadmap
https://opencast.jira.com/wiki/display/MH/Matterhorn+Road+Map

11. Commercial ecosystem
Capture Agents and hardware
Support and Development
Hosted solutions
Sponsorship

12. Capture Agent & Appliance Vendors

13. Contract support and development
Support your deployment of Opencast by
• Implementation planning
• Providing immediate support for critical production problems
• Toolkits for managing production systems
• Contract development to solve specific bugs or implement new
features
• Support for other commercial partners (e.g. capture agent vendors)
Vendors
• Entwine
• Teltek

14. Hosted services
You install the capture agents; hosting provider runs Opencast
Client hosting:
Entwine
NCast
Teltek
Hosting for a defined user community:
SWITCH (Swiss National Research and Education Network)

15. First crowd-funded development project
Goal: Modernize the Opencast OSGI Technology Stack
Proposer and implementer: Entwine
Value: $50,000
Time to reach funding goal: 10 weeks
Funded by: Harvard University, University of Cape Town,
Universität Ulm, Universität Köln, SWITCH, Universität Stuttgart,
ELAN e. V., Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg,
Ghent University, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Entwine

16. Sponsors
Contributions from Opencast
sponsors help support
community activities that
benefit everyone, such as
Quality Assurance.

17. Project ecosystem
Open source projects that extend Opencast, or provide complementary or
alternative functionality, including:
Lecturesight (http://lecturesight.org)
Automated, affordable presenter tracking for PTZ cameras using
image recognition
Paella (http://paellaplayer.upv.es/)
A multi-stream HTML5 Opencast-compatible video player from UPV
PyCA (https://github.com/lkiesow/pyCA)
A simple Python capture agent for Raspberry Pi and other devices
(also, turn anything with a REST API into a capture agent!)
TheREC / MHRI (http://zentrum.virtuos.uni-osnabrueck.de/therec/)
Windows-based desktop capture agent with upload to Opencast

18. Adopter Highlights
Five examples of Opencast production deployments, illustrating Opencast’s flexibility:
Manchester
Largest Opencast deployment, up to 350 CAs, 20,000 hours per semester
Opt-out model, highly automated, high-volume throughput.
Harvard DCE
High production values, professional A/V hardware.
Active contributors, runs Opencast in AWS instances.
UCT
Affordable, DIY deployment scaling up to over 50 venues.
Support from Teltek and Entwine.
Osnabrueck
Pioneer and early adopter, involves many postgraduate students in research projects
that contribute to Opencast or become their own projects
UCB
Modernized the webcast@berkeley platform with Opencast,
publishes to Youtube

19. Opencast 2.0 Highlights (June 2015)
Reconceptualized and redesigned user
interface (i18n)
New HTML5 multi-stream video player
(“Theodul”)
Support for extended metadata
Workflow and efficiency improvements

20. Completely new admin UI
Transformed user experience,
flexible roles
Designed by EspressLabs
Built by Entwine with
AngularJS
Translations via crowdin
(Dutch, French, German,
Japanese, Spanish)

21. Theodul HTML5 Multi-stream Player

22. Planned for Opencast 2.1 (Dec 2015)
OSGI update
Video-cropping
External Application API
Asset management layer
Scheduling with extended metadata
Participation management module (supporting opt-out models)
Capture Agent API 2.0
Cover Image Workflow Operation
Ingest of partial tracks
OAI-PMH repository based on the asset manager with publish and retract
workflow operations
Support for secured downloads and streams through URL signing
Workflow operation to strip media files from the archive
Support service tools
Youtube v3 API upgrade

23. Get involved today!
Opencast website
http://opencast.org/ (read the adopter stories!)
Mailing lists
community@opencast.org (low frequency)
matterhorn-users@opencast.org (implementers, users)
matterhorn@opencast.org (developers)
IRC
#opencast (irc.freenode.net)
Source code, issue tracking, documentation
https://bitbucket.org/opencast-community
http://opencast.jira.com
http://docs.opencast.org
Weekly technical meetings and monthly adopter meetings (BigBlueButton)
Opencast community summits and participation in conferences
Commercial support for
Matterhorn:
Entwine
entwinemedia.com
Teltek
www.teltek.es
and others.

24. http://opencast.org
matterhorn-users+subscribe@opencast.org