Hi all,
Yesterday we tried to use the ECD in a production environment, confident
that the hard and software was mature enough to do some recordings in an
actual class environment. Our experience however was everything but
satisfactory and led us to do a last minute replacement of the ECD with
the default opencast capture agent.
We found that since the last firmware ( the one for download on epiphan
site and the one provided by Greg on the list here ) only 1 stream is
processed on the server. The recordings we made only show the video
stream in the engage player, however the original file on the server
shows a multistream avi with 3 streams. This problem is inconvenient but
not that problematic since we could recover the original multistream (
hopefully we can recover the independant streams from the avi ). The
following recordings had more major problems. We had to do 3 recordings
in a row, one 30 minutes long ( which we can recover from the server )
and 2 following that of 1h30 that both failed.
The second recording disappeared from the capturing list on the admin
server after some minutes, and went to processing, resulting in an empty
directory on the server. The recording had more than 1 hour to go at
that point. The third recording started successfully and changed status
to sending for processing ( or something similar ) after less than an
hour, more than 30 minutes needed to be captured at that point. This
recording was unrecoverable as well, since there is no way to access the
files on the ECD and see what is actually happening on that machine.
This experience leads us to wonder if this machine is production worthy
and if anyone is using this in a reliable way. We understand that this
is still in active development but also believe that basic functionality
and reliability should be expected. The fact that there is no way to see
the files on the ECD and download them from the device in case something
goes wrong is also a big problem for us, questioning the fact if we can
rely on this in a production environment.
Maybe someone on the list can shed some light on what to expect from the
device in the future and if someone has different experiences with this,
please let us know. At the moment we don't feel confident to use this
device in any classroom environments.
Thanks
Kristof Keppens
Ghent University
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