Galicaster project Home

Introduction

The main goal of the Galicaster Project is to develop an open solution to provide flexible, state-of-the-art solutions for recording educational multimedia contents, like lectures and conferences.

Galicaster capture solution is compatible with Opencast-Matterhorn. Galicaster-based devices can work as improved Matterhorn capture agents. They can register as a capture agent, thus being able to receive scheduled recordings and ingest the resulting mediapackages automatically.

New features on Galicaster 1.2

Easier configuration by "Input Profiles"
New exporting operations, zip and side-by-side to folder.
- Operations can be enqueued, performed immediately or scheduled for the night.
Improved Blackmagic cards support.
Runs on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (1.2.1 in Ubuntu 10.10 too)

Key Features

Live audio and video feedback over a touch interface.
"Recording" red light sign
Visual alarm on poor or no audio.
No scaler needed for VGA input.
Advanced media manager, allowing playback, metadata edition and sorting.
Opencast Matterhorn compatible, performs schedule and ingestion.
Manual and automatic start, stop and pause of the recordings.
Remote monitoring via VNC.
HD and SD recording supported from HD-SDI, HDMI, component and composite video sources.

Main Goal

Galicaster can be used as an automatic in-room recording solution for the classroom, keeping the professor informed and in control, or it can be used as a mobile unit, perfect for recording meetings and conferences.

Our main goal is the creation of an aplication adaptable to different scenarios and equipment. So far, two Galicaster configurations have reached a mature state of development:Fixed Galicaster in the Classroom and Galicaster for Mobile operation.

Galicaster in the Classroom: The idea is to deploy Galicaster in a classroom environment with a basic set of controls and a tactile interface. It works automatically but some manual actions are available to the lecturers, such as muting the audio or pausing/playing/stopping the recording if desired.
Galicaster for Mobile operation: The idea here is to buid a a complete portable recording station, providing full control on the recorded media. Operators can get real-time feedback from cameras and microphones, so that they can react immediately against any unexpected situation, manage a repository with all the recording media, delete many recordings in a single operation, send and resend media to distribution channels, label tracks, etc.

Versatility

Galicaster can be used alone, but it is virtually adaptable to any publishing platform, since it keep all the recording metadata and video and audio tracks are recorded separately. Proof of this is the combined [Galicaster and Opencast Matterhorn] installation which is already in production at the University of Vigo.

Galicaster can be seamlessly integrated with a wide variety of environments: low-cost, flexible equipments; best-performance, customized installations; existing campus-wide infrastructures; media distribution platforms, etc.

Technologies

Both applications are based on Python and GStreamer, both long term projects supported by large communities, ensuring their adaptability to most of the operating systems in the UNIX family. They can also be adapted to multiple kinds of hardware, expanding the possibilities to record with many types of devices such as laptops, HD Webcams, TV Cameras, video players, microphones ...