Through the elearning training we are trying to encourage teachers to make more use of video and other multimedia content in their courses. This presents us with several issues, mainly because most video streaming sites are blocked by the University (to save bandwidth). This means we either don’t include the videos or we download to run them locally. So far we’ve just been uploading them into the Moodle course, which is fine for relatively low numbers of videos (or for very short videos), but is soon going to become unsustainable. Also, we’d like to suggest video content teacher may wish to use – so it wouldn’t be appropriate to have these filling up the Moodle server.

One solution is to use a multimedia management streaming server, so over the last few days I’ve been testing out Kaltura. It’s an open source video content platform and has plugins for Moodle, WordPress amongst others.

Installation was straightforward enough on my laptop, once I’d got the necessary prerequisite packages installed and settings. Couple of issues I did come across:

1) On my first attempt at installation, it installed on the root of my webserver, so I was unable to access my other web applications. This was because I specified ‘localhost’ as the domain. I tried to figure out how to move to a subdirectory (see: http://www.kaltura.org/moving-installation-new-directory) but haven’t got that one figured out yet. So I just set up a new host (http://kaltura.localhost) and used this instead. So now I can access Kaltura and my original webapps, with out switching configurations and restarting apache.

2) When the prerequisites say that you need a mail server, it really does mean that you need one! After installation, when creating publisher accounts, the login details are emailed only – so there’s no way to set the password except by following the link in the email. I assumed I’d be able to reset the passwords manually and so the mail server integration wouldn’t matter to much. Given that this is just running on my laptop, I haven’t got a mail server running, so then had to set about trying to get one configured. Fortunately I found these instructions on how to configure postfix to relay through a gmail account on Ubuntu (I’m running 10.10). I set up a clean/default postfix installation and used the settings/instructions posted in the comments by Michael M. I used a ‘disposable’ gmail account, so that if something goes wrong, I won’t get blocked from my normal gmail account, but seems to be working well so far. It’s also good now that I can have emails sent for all the webapps on my machine.

So after I had these 2 issues resolved, I was ready to start having a play. All seems to be working well, although I was hoping that people would be able to browse the uploaded content without having first logged in. I guess we’d just need to create a generic account. If anyone knows how to set this up then please let me know – or if there is a generic Kaltura content browser application that I could use?

I tried uploading a few flv and mp4 videos to embed onto a webpage, and seem to work well. A little slow on my machine, but then my netbook probably isn’t designed to be a media processing and streaming server!

My final experiment was to look at the Moodle plugin, unfortunately I had a few more issues with getting this working. When trying to register the module in Moodle, I kept getting the error that ‘Your Kaltura registration failed. Missing KS. Session not established’ when trying to enter the url, username and password for my Kaltura server. After a bit of investigation I found it was a bug with how the partnerId was(n’t) being passed. I found a hack around this, see: http://www.kaltura.org/config-moodle-mod-moodleadmin-page, but it’s not pretty!

Now I have the option to add a video resource in Moodle directly from my Kaltura server, or so I thought I had, currently whatever I seem to search for (tags, video titles, categories which I know exist in the account I have) returns no results. Next step is to try and figure out why I can’t seem to find any of the videos I have uploaded…

On Friday and Monday I spent several hours (about 7 or 8 in total) on Skype to Eduardo in Barcelona who is helping us to get the server fixed. Things are made a little easier by the fact we have 2 identical servers, alpha and bravo. Alpha is (generally) running fine at Arid campus and bravo is the broken server at Ayder, so the plan was to make a copy of alpha onto one of the spare disks, modify it slightly (name, IP address etc) then use this to fix bravo.

The clone had already been made – to one of the 4 physical disks in the machine. All I needed to to do was switch the disks around to test the clone, then take the cloned disk to Ayder. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the cloned disk to work and on Friday it took Eduardo and I a little while to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the way the disks were numbered on the server label:

didn’t actually match how the were referred to by the operating system, so rather then switching the disk in positions 0 and 2, we should have been doing 0 and 1.

Finally we got this issue resolved and the disk ready to take to Ayder, plus a few other backup options that Eduardo had come up with in case this disk didn’t solve the problem.

On Monday, I took the disk over to Ayder, got on Skype, and spent a few hours messaging Eduardo (and a little later Mike) and we managed to get the server booting up correctly. In the end we managed to fix the problem without needing to use the disk we’d had the confusion over on Friday.

But unfortunately all is not quite finished. The terminals at Ayder aren’t yet connecting to the properly. So next job is to get that resolved.

All of which means that we still haven’t been able to get the lab open for students to use, but hoping to be open properly in the next week or so. Still much more work to be done, so will keep us all busy for the coming weeks I’m sure.