I noticed, on the Welcome page of the most recent Matterhorn 1.3.x, two new
buttons titled "Capture Tools" and "Confidence Monitoring".

As far as I can tell these two buttons are designed to reference pages on a
Capture Agent and not on the server, and currently reference the demo
capture agent, which won't be installed on a lot of servers.

This is potentially pretty confusing to new viewers of the Welcome page
because it mixes server functionality with capture agent functionality and
it won't be obvious at first as to where these services are running. If the
idea is that the server can be used to manually start/stop the CA this
might also violate one of the core design ideas of a Capture Agent in that
the CA should reach out to the server, but the server never has to
communicate with the CA.

One of the things I really liked about the Matterhorn architecture was the
pretty clean split between the capture agent and the server, and the
defined REST API containing the interface and features that needed to be
provisioned. I think this new Welcome page muddies the water a lot and
suggest these new buttons be removed or relocated somewhere else.

In fact, to go even further, with two new commercial encoders available for
Matterhorn (Epiphan and NCast) and more in the pipeline, maybe it's time to
split off the CA reference design into its own project to keep the CA at
arms length from the server and to keep that nice split clean and very
clearly defined.

Hank

-- 
Hank Magnuski
Direct: +1-408-541-9230 x205
Cell: +1-650-714-2409
Skype: hank.magnuski
www.ncast.com
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