Opencast Studio

Studio is a small web application that runs in the browser and allows the user to record webcam video, the user's display and microphone audio. Afterwards, the user can easily upload their recording to an Opencast instance.

Studio uses the recording capabilities built into modern browsers to record audio and video streams. The recording happens completely in the user's browser: no server is involved in that part. Network access is only needed to initially load the application and to (optionally) upload the videos to an Opencast instance.

This module includes Studio directly into Opencast and pre-configures it accordingly. It is available at https://yourserver/studio. Note: Studio is developed outside of the main repository: you can find additional documentation in that repository. Please also report bugs and feature requests for Studio to that repository, unless it's a bug related to the integration in Opencast.

Giving users access to Studio

The path /studio is accessible by users with the role ROLE_ADMIN or ROLE_STUDIO. The APIs used by Studio (/ingest/* and info/me.json) are also accessible if the user has ROLE_STUDIO.

The preferred way to let your users access Studio is via LTI. Remember to configure your LTI users to have the role ROLE_STUDIO so that they can access Studio and all APIs used by Studio.

Configuring Studio

Studio is pre-configured via etc/ui-config/mh_default_org/studio/settings.toml. You can modify that file to change the configuration, but note that you probably don't want to touch opencast.serverUrl and opencast.loginProvided. For information on possible configuration values, please see CONFIGURATION.md in the Studio repository.

Workflow requirements

The videos produced by the built-in recording capabilities of browsers are often quite exotic, to put it mildly. The Opencast workflow responsible for processing uploads from Studio needs to be able to handle the following things:

Additionally, for the video cutting in Studio to work, your workflow needs to respect the SMIL catalog Studio includes in the ingest. The default Studio workflow can handle all those things.

Finally, here are some other oddities and details of videos produced by browsers: