One of the most common questions used to be “how many people can actually participate in a live webcast?”. Well, this was a tough one. Although ePresence software is highly scalable by design, there was no actual infrastructure in place to offer an environment that can allocate hundreds or thousands of concurrent connections. All we could offer is to shop around for high capacity co-location providers, which often resulted in significant TCO. The new release of ePresence Capture addresses this by supporting all 3 major Flash servers (Adobe Flash Media 3, Wowza and Red5) as well as Windows Media Services and Helix. We have successfully tested our systems for major webcasting events against 3 of the world’s leading content delivery networks (CDNs): Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/). Limelight (http://www.limelightnetworks.com/) and EdgeCast (http://www.edgecast.com/). These networks employ so-called Cloud Computing technology for streaming content delivery.  We have also added support for the most advanced H.264 live video encoding, which is supported by all 3 CDNs. This made an unlimited rich media webcasting with stunning high definition video quality a reality.

This release is all about user interface. We have revisited the entire workflow on both ePresence Server and ePresence Capture Station.

ePresence Server 4.2

The back end has been completely re-designed. It now relies on various framework technologies, including MonoRail and Hibernate. These frameworks allowed us not only make the web interface ”2008-looking” but also highly customizable. The new features include a calendar view for the webcast schedule, waiting rooms that allow users to login into events in advance, a media portal view for the archive repository with automatically generated thumbnails, and multiple other enhancements.

ePresence Capture 4.2

The main focus on the capture station side was simplification. We decided to develop a brand new application for the capture station that fully supports our new hardware with embedded touch screen. Although the code is heavily based on ePresence Producer, the user interface has been completely re-designed. We decided to develop a very simple rich media capture application with no more than 3 clicks involved in a process, whether it is a recording session or publishing procedure. Big touch screen controls are now easy to operate so there is no need for a mouse or stylus. There are several functionality enhancements, but the most important one is related to our VGA processing module. We have significantly improved our VGA processing allowing not only fast and stable VGA screen shot capture but also a Flash video streaming from the presenter’s screen. Now ePresence is good not only for grabbing static Power Point slides but also for various types of animations, drawing, etc. The ePresence Producer is still supported for advanced users.

It’s always great to see people using and talking about ePresence. Most recently, InsideOCULA – the official publication of the Ontario College and University Library association – featured two articles describing how ePresence is being used for educational content delivery and distance courses at Seneca College and the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto:

Using ePresence in Distance Learning
By Wendy Newman, Senior Fellow, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

“Early on, Gwen identified [ePresence’s] substantial potential as a means to present the core lecture content of the course. Students would be able to see and hear their own instructor, access PowerPoints that captured the major points, view lectures at their own convenience, and re-view them, or selected sections of them, at any time.” (Taken from InsideOCULA, Fall 2008, p. 4)

Using ePresence for video streaming, marketing, and information literacy at Seneca College
By Jane Foo & Jennifer Peters-Lise, Seneca College

“Feedback from the faculty was positive – streaming the video in-house was reliable and fast. In addition, [the instructor] noted that students used the video as a study tool, apparent by the large number of students referring to the videos in their exam answers.” (Taken from InsideOCULA, Fall 2008, pp. 5-6)

This past May, ePresence was also highlighted in the Technology section of the Texas Bar Journal in a list of leading and innovative open source solutions:

Join the Free/Open Source Software Movement
By Joel D. Alleyne

“Several innovative open source software projects provide options for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software products. These software systems often run on a variety of operating systems; some even run on Windows. Here is a list of my favorite projects…” (Taken from Texas Bar Journal, May 2008, pp. 364-365)

For more information on ePresence’s open source webcasting solution, visit us at http://epresence.tv!

ePresence Producer 4.1.1 is an update release that gives better control over Flash video bit rate for live webcasting. It provides “low”, “medium”, “high” and “best” stream quality options that translate to 56K, 128K, 256K and 512K bit rates. The default option is now “medium”, which gives a good picture quality (On2 v6 codec) and keeps the server load reasonable.

Peter Wolf

What’s the most expensive part of any webcasting system? A server? A capture station? Maybe the bandwidth? None of the above really. The most expensive resource is the person who runs the webcast. This becomes a major problem when you need to expand your rich media production beyond one classroom or one presentation per week.

I believe we have done a decent job reducing the production complexity to 5-6 clicks of a mouse, but what if you have 5 or more classes going on simultaneously? With traditional approach you are going to need the same number of people who know what to click, and it doesn’t matter how hard or easy the capture software interface is. This is clearly a bottleneck with any webcasting system — any system except ePresence 4.1.

We have been getting way too many requests to address the automation issue to ignore it. The last drop was a request from the Government of Ontario, which has 6 legislative TV channels that have to be streamed live and recorded for on-demand access all at the same time. Fortunately for us, the development wasn’t very hard as ePresence is based on service-oriented architecture. We figured that the webcast automation fits nicely as an additional scheduling service, that allows one or many capture stations “listen” to it, waking up for the webcasts and going back to “sleep” on time.

The publishing process is 100% automated as well. The speaker’s laptop (if present) can be plugged into the capture station (via VGA), enabling automatic slide capture, synchronized with the video and/or audio. All the presenter has to do is show up on time and plug a VGA cable to her laptop.

The ePresence Administrator can schedule webcasts for live and/or on-demand viewing using the same interface as before. The system automatically detects the capture stations running in automated mode and offers scheduling presentations for execution:

From the Control Center, it is also possible to check whether remote stations are up and running:

You may ask “Hmm, this sounds good, but what about my ePresence cart I have to wheel between multiple rooms and control my webcasts manually?” We have added the automation feature making it easier to equip single or multiple rooms with ePresence. We have also left the manual control option the way it was before:

Greetings! One of our new development directions is integration with course management systems (CMS). The first choice, of course, was Moodle, as we believe it is the #1 Open Source CMS. The idea is simple: the course administrator must be able to add a rich media presentation to a course without actually leaving Moodle. How is it technically possible? Moodle is a PHP-based system and ePresence Server is a .NET application. The answer is XML! Two applications can communicate regardless of the operating system or programming language it’s built with via an XML-based protocol (SOAP). During our experiments we have successfully deployed Moodle 1.9 on our Windows server and ePresence on our Ubuntu 8 server and then reversed them. In both cases the integration layer worked just fine!

So what is it like to use an ePresence Activity module for Moodle? Well, it’s very simple: all the course administrator needs to do is select an ePresence presentation from the list and click “Save”. The rest looks very similar to the way YouTube video are embedded, except ePresence embeds the entire talk with video, slides, table of contents and interactive timeline providing the best UI for browsing and search.

I have recorded a quick 2 minutes video that demonstrates ePresence activity module for Moodle in action. Please look: http://epresence.tv/mediacontent/archives/moodle/?archiveID=337 I hope you’ll enjoy it!

We are not going to stop with this. SAKAI and Black Board integration projects are already under way!

Peter Wolf

ePresence 4.1 is out.

There have been tons of bug fixes and small improvements in this release. However, the size of the blog article doesn’t let me publish all of them. Here are the most significant improvements you’ll notice in this version:

1. Several severe security flaws have been fixed in ePresence Server
2. ePresence now supports Flash media format for live webcasting. This eliminates the confusion that existed with other media players and makes ePresence live webcast a lot more accessible. The feature is available for both Audio+Video and Audio-only presentations.
3. Complete production automation and session scheduling. Imagine multiple classes that have to be archived and/or streamed live at the same time. With earlier version of the software this required as many operators as classes. Now ePresence Capture station can work in automated mode, checking the webcast schedule and launching the sessions automatically. It is now possible to equip classrooms with inexpensive gear and control webcasts remotely via centralized web-based interface. The entire campus could be controlled by one A/V person! The publishing process is now automated as well. Of course, we still support manual control for portable Capture Stations.
4. If the presentation consists primarily of screen capture sessions then the best UI would be a full screen presentation. This template now exists for both live and on-demand webcasts.
5. The new Red5 ePresence Edition supports the RTMPT protocol, which allows streaming through firewalls.
6. The new ePresence Edition of Red5 allows setting custom drives and directories for Flash movies.
7. ePresence Producer support of Epiphan VGA2USB is now lot more stable.
8. The Control Center administrative interface has been significantly simplified.

Our web conferencing solution is still in its beta stage. We are working on significant improvements in this area and looking forward to release it as a separate product in the near future.

Peter Wolf & ePresence Development team