Opencast Studio

A web-based recording studio for Opencast.

Opencast 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.

Supported Browsers

The following table depicts the current state of browser support. Please note that Opencast Studio uses fairly new web technologies that are not yet (fully) supported by all browsers. That's usually the reason for why this app does not work on a particular browser/system. In the table, "(✔)" means partial support and/or major bugs are still present.

OS	Browser	Capture Camera	Capture Screen	Record	Notes
Win10	Chrome 77	✔	✔	✔	Video file does not allow seeking (#517)
Win10	Firefox 68	✔	✔	✔
Win10	Edge 79	✔	✔	✔	Video file does not allow seeking (#517)
Linux	Chrome 77	✔	✔	✔	Video file does not allow seeking (#517)
Linux	Firefox 68	✔	✔	✔
macOS	Chrome 78	✔	✔	✔	Video file does not allow seeking (#517)
macOS	Firefox 70	✔	✔	✔
macOS	Safari 13	✔	✘	✘	Recording seems to fail due to unsupported MIME type
Android	Chrome 78	(✔)	✘	✔	No camera selection (#217)
Android	Firefox 68	✔	✘	✔
iOS	Safari	(✘)	✘	(✘)	Many issues. For details see issue #84
iOS	Firefox	✘	✘	✘	Non-Safari browsers on iOS are severely limited
iOS	Chrome	✘	✘	✘	Non-Safari browsers on iOS are severely limited

Browsers/systems not listed in this table are not currently tested by us, so they might or might not work.

Usage

There are mainly two ways how to use Opencast Studio.

Standalone Version at studio.opencast.org

This is the easiest solution in many situations. However, uploading your recording to your own/your institution's Opencast server becomes a bit more difficult.

In order to upload to an Opencast server from studio.opencast.org, that server needs to be configured appropriately. In particular, CORS requests from Studio need to be allowed and return the status code 200. For nginx, you need to add this to your configuration:

add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin https://studio.opencast.org always;
add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods 'GET, POST, OPTIONS' always;
add_header Access-Control-Allow-Credentials true always;
add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers 'Origin,Content-Type,Accept,Authorization' always;

# Always respond with 200 to OPTIONS requests as browsers do not accept
# non-200 responses to CORS preflight requests.
if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
    # On newer nginx versions, you can optionally send an
    # Access-Control-Max-Age header to reduce the number of requests a browser
    # will send.
    #add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
    return 200;
}

Self-hosted/Integrated in Opencast

Many institutions prefer a self-hosted solution. As this is a client-only application, you can simply build Opencast Studio and then serve the resulting static files.

More easily even, Opencast Studio will be integrated into and shipped with Opencast itself – for versions ≥8.2. With this, you don't need to configure your webserver (as described above) and you are more flexible in terms of user authentication.

Configuration

See CONFIGURATION.md.

Opencast APIs used by Studio

Opencast Studio uses the following APIs:

/ingest/*
/info/me.json

You have to make sure that these APIs are accessible to the user using Studio. In Opencast ≥8.2, providing a user with ROLE_STUDIO should grant a user all necessary rights. In older versions, you might need to create such a role in the security configuration (e.g. mh_default_org.xml) of Opencast.

Build Instructions

To build Studio yourself, execute these commands:

% git clone git@github.com:elan-ev/opencast-studio.git
% cd opencast-studio
% npm install
% npm run build

This will generate static content you can serve via any web server in build/. That's it.

If you prefer to run a local development server directly, you can use this instead:

% npm run start

Additional Build Options

By default, Studio expects to be deployed under the root path of a domain (e.g. https://studio.example.com/) and using a sub-path would not work (e.g. https://example.com/studio). This can be changed by using a number of build options. You can apply these options by exporting them as environment variable before starting the build process like this:

export OPTION=VALUE
npm run build

Option	Example	Description
`PUBLIC_URL`	`/studio`	Path from which Studio will be served
`REACT_APP_SETTINGS_PATH`	`/mysettings.json`	Path from which to load the configuration

tgloeggl / opencast-studio