Hi Ryan,
We at UC Berkeley are in the same boat as you (running PcP currently and
looking for a replacement). In fact, our involvement in Matterhorn comes
from the fact that we recognized Apple's PcP software appears to be
something that has never gotten much love from a commercial vendor.
Firstly, MH capture agent software currently requires Ubuntu or Debian
to install. I do not think there has been any known attempts to get MH
capture agent software working on OS X.
FWIW, I actually went ahead and tried to install Ubuntu + Matterhorn 1.0
on a Mac Mini in October 2010. At that time, Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 were
obviously fairly new releases and as such, I had ran into a myriad of
issues including cannot install from boot disk, goes into "power save"
mode after boot, Mac Mini will not boot without an attached monitor
(this was the killer) and VGA2USB driver install issues when I tried to
install/run these OSes on a Mac Mini. I also tried Ubuntu 9.x and that
did not go much better. Nonetheless, there is definitely a community
that does install Ubuntu on Apple devices and there is even a wiki for that:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleIntelInstallation
I suspect that installing Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 may actually work on older
Apple devices now (I think the community support will always lag and
have trouble with new Ubuntu versions and new Apple hardware). However,
I also suspect that even if you get a working Ubuntu install on a Mac
Mini, you will probably run into some of the other issues I described
above and support will be iffy.
In our case, we are now looking to find a good, stable, small hardware
that is scalable (the reference hardware is good, stable and small; but
not scalable since you have to build the box yourself). This may be
something like a ultra small form factor Dell + external capture cards,
some third party vendor solution (none currently exist IMHO for low end
capture at a reasonable price) or something else.
The good news for you is that MH capture software is very flexible and
the A/V setup you described should work with MH software (though I have
not seen anyone use the devices you listed with MH and should really
leave that for the MH developers to answer definitively).
I hope this rather lengthy email helps you and please do feel free to
ask more questions on list and keep us updated on your progress with MH.
Kevin Chan
Operations Team
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
On 7/19/2012 6:53 PM, Ryan Monroe wrote:
Hello eveyone,
First off im brand new to opencast. I just setup core today to play
with, it took a few hours but I got it running!! So far so good, next
im gonna mess with capture agent and read read read!
We currently use Apple's Podcast Producer to capture some of our
clinic sessions. Apple is killing off PcP (or so it seems) and we need
to find somethig else as we want to xpand but dont want to further
invest in PcP. PcP captured the video, encoded and added a short
intro, title slide, watermark, and outtro then published the video to
the PcP library where we used The RSS feeds to feed a CMS.
Is it possible to use Mac Mini's as matterhorn capture agents?
Currently I have PcP using Cisco/Tandberg Precision USB camera's
(great camera btw) for video, and audio is captured by a Shure
condenser mic wired to a Presonus USB audio input device that powers
the mic and feeds the audio into the mac. The capture quality from
this setup is pretty good and id like to keep it intact as much as
possible.
I have so many questions I hardly know where to begin, but this is a
good start I suppose. I am sure there are others in a similar
situation considering PcP's demise.
Thanks in Advance,
Ryan Monroe
Systems Administrator
Adelphi University
-Sent from my iPad
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