Hi Stephen, > 1. Does Matterhorn support USB webcams?
No, as of our latest release (1.0.1), there is no support for USB webcams. As you have seen, there is code in 1.1 undergoing the release candidate process that does support webcams. It's unclear as to whether this will be a feature of 1.1 given the issues that have been found. > It's not clear to me what "reference hardware" means. I would prefer > to see Matterhorn define a "supported hardware" list, which would > mean that if Matterhorn starts failing to work with a device or class > of device listed, then effort will be applied to fix the support for > that device (prioritized above, for example, adding new features). Reference hardware is roughly supported hardware; this is the hardware we expect QA testing to be done on. As you notice, it doesn't include USB webcams or usb audio sources yet. > Right now USB webcams appear to have got into the category of > "working, but unsupported" which is that they were usable in 1.0 or > at some point after 1.0, but are no longer usable in 1.1.x and > there's no specific commitment to fix that in the short term. It's more of a "beta code, untested". USB webcams or, more clearly, arbitrary gstreamer pipelines for the capture agent, were not a feature of 1.0. We announced the code was added to trunk awhile back because there was so much community interest in the feature. > It's really important to communicate the extent of support for > hardware clearly to adopting institutions. Only the reference hardware is what we QA on, only that is "safe" for deployment. Lots of people use other things though, but if you want to use something outside of the reference hardware you should consider the level of QA and customization you might need to do. > 2. Should Matterhorn support USB webcams? > > I would like to suggest that it is in fact important for Matterhorn to > do so sooner rather than later, as a question of product strategy. > Webcam support makes it much easier for new sites to get going in an > inexpensive way to evaluate the solution. HD webcams are also likely > to be the solution of choice for some types of (smaller) venues. I would agree, which is why we added support to the trunk instead of working on some of the other features. We just have not had adequate resources to test/debug/fix. Every time we add another device to the capture agent we have a battery of tests we need to do to make sure it works with the rest of matterhorn. We have to do these tests each release indefinitely, unless we want to start dropping hardware. For this reason we've purposefully kept both the hardware and software platform for the capture agent tightly controlled - you'll notice that only instructions are provided for it working on ubuntu, for instance. I welcome thoughts on how we could resource the testing of CA in a more efficient yet complete manner. Chris -- Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938 Phone: 1.306.966.1442 Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan 176 Thorvaldson Building 110 Science Place Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C9 _______________________________________________ Matterhorn mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn To unsubscribe please email [email protected] _______________________________________________
