Hi All, Ok so a bit of a rant, but I've been to a few conferences / talks / discussion and I think we (myself included) might be underselling Matterhorn or overstating the competition a bit. When people like Mediasite are talking up their products they're not focusing on the areas which (I think) are of real concern for us, they're actually talking about stuff that Matterhorn is potentially capable of doing much better and I think this might be scaring people away. I don't really have a specific goal with this conversation, but I'd like to know what people in the community think?
Just look at this for example. Here's a talk I did in Norway and was recorded on a dedicated Mediasite box (sorry :' ( you'll have to install Silverlight if you want to see it): http://webtv.uit.no/Mediasite/Play/5e94b90d23ff47a8af0ffbbd437656dc1d?catalog=ce785a7a-45b9-4492-a867-124f50d0139c The UI might be glossy-ish but the whole experience seems filled with major problems. Just for information, they had professional AV staff there on the day monitoring everything so if it ever stood a change of working properly it would have been then. The VGA signal acquisition is terrible, there's horrible compression on the video signal, the same video signal loses audio sync *within a single stream*, animation capture and sync is appalling, the constant scrolling of the slides is hugely distracting... I could go on. Want to embed the video in another page? LOL, better write your own embed code then: http://www.worldofwebcast.com/post/mediasite-tech-tip-how-to-embed-any-mediasite-webcast Want to view it on a mobile device? Hahahahah: http://i.imgur.com/KeC6k.png If you look around the web there's numerous different installations which all have the same problems, it's not just limited to one site's implementation of the system. And yet people are willing to by these with a per unit RRP cost of $16,000...... sixteen thousand dollars! Per room! I guess what I'm trying to get it is that I think the default responses to enquires about Matterhorn seem overly conservative when considering the above. When I was initially asking around if Matterhorn was any good I commonly heard something along the lines of "it has its problems", then followed by a longer explanation of some of the issues and the good points. I think this is because people are trying to manage expectations and avoid disappointment and I get that, I'm just not sure if it helps us to grow the community. </rant> Stuart Phillipson | Media Technologies Coordinator Room 1.025 Devonshire House University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Phone: 016130 60478
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