Email and collaboration tools

Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.

Hard drive based back up server

We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To reflect our paranoia of making sure all your ThayerFS data is safe, we’re adding another layer of redundancy to our data back up plan. We just started setting up a new “online backup server”. It consists of fifteen 1 Terabyte hard drives which we’ll use to back up ThayerFS. This system will eventually be located off-site. We’ll continue to use our tape library which will be located in yet another off-site location.

Weather station and Solar Panel monitoring

We’re in the middle of a project to get a weather station installed on the roof of Murdough. We’ll be using the same system to monitor the output of the Solar Panels which are already installed on the roof. The plan is to make the data available on the web for those interested in local conditions and for research purposes.

Spanos lighting improvements

We have been working with our building manager and FO&M to add special lights to properly illuminate presenters. This should improve the quality of our lecture capture video and should reduce the harsh shadows the current lighting causes on the speaker’s face.

A/V system improvements, documentation, and repairs

Collaborating with Instrument Room personnel, we have been working for some time now to make our classroom and meeting room audio visual systems more user-friendly. This includes simplification of touch screen controls or even their replacement with pushbutton controls, enhanced documentation about how to use the systems, improved image quality in Spanos and C200, a combination white board/projector screen in M210, additional microphone options, improved/repaired audio, etc. Some of these improvements are finished, but we still have a long way to go on others.

New Intel compiler available

We purchased two floating licenses of Intel Fortran and C++ compilers for Linux. They are available on any of our Linux clients or compute servers. Also included with these licenses are the MKL and IPP libraries.

For more information about these new compilers and how to use them, please see our Linux Services page.

New lab computers

In the next few months, we plan to deploy new lab computers for the Linux lab in Cummings and to replace the ten oldest computers in MacLean 210.

Adobe Contribute rollout soonish

We’ve purchased licenses of Adobe Contribute, which will allow the Thayer Community to create and edit web pages in a simple WYSIWYG editor. The experience is similar to a word processor. If you are interested in using this software, please contact us.

Vista planning

While we’re content with Windows XP, Windows Vista is an inevitability as XP support is dropped by Microsoft. We’re going to start looking at the best way to image and deploy Vista on lab, desktop, and laptop computers.

Blade servers

We recently took delivery of a new blade chassis and some new blade servers. The chassis can accommodate up to 16 servers. The preliminary plan is to replace our aging babylon compute cluster with a couple of blades. This will reduce space, electricity, cooling, and administration time, while increasing the computing power over our current cluster. We’ll have several empty slots available for faculty with research projects that need extra computer power.

Condor High Throughput Computing

We’re investigating the use of Condor High Throughput Computing on our linux clusters. This would allow the Thayer community to submit compute jobs and have them distributed automatically to our compute clusters.

Currently, we are testing this on our limited-access sisyphus cluster, but hope to roll it out to an upgraded babylon cluster after the Spring term. Jobs run on either cluster will be able to use the other cluster’s CPUs if they are available.

Hardy Heron is coming…

The new version of Ubuntu, version 8.04 (hardy heron), is scheduled to be released at the end of April. This new release features many enhancements to the version we’re currently running on our linux clients, and is also the next of Ubuntu’s “long-term release” versions, which will get security updates for a longer period of time than their other versions.

We have been alpha (and now beta) testing this to ensure that any bugs related to our systems are reported and corrected prior to its official release. We plan to upgrade the Cummings 227 linux lab with the new version (and new computers, too!) after the Spring term. We will also be in touch with faculty and staff who have linux clients to schedule their upgrades.

ThayerCups server upgrade

We just upgraded the CUPS print server that handles print jobs from Mac and Linux clients. There should not be any change in the way you print from these platforms.  The new server is now easier to back up.

Application Virtualization

We are testing, “Application Virtualization”, a new technique for encapsulating applications to ease deployment to lab computers and client computers.

Atrium Help Desk continues

We continue to hold our “Atrium Help Desk” from 3:00-4:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come by the atrium if you have any computing-related questions.

Recently I came across the Epiphan VGA2USB frame grabber. While simpler, it looked like it might shed features we don’t really need, while providing better video quality.  We decided to order one, and yesterday it arrived on my desk.  I decided to do a very quick side-by-side comparison with the TwinPact 100.

Here are some findings.

The Epiphan VGA2USB lacks features found on the TwinPact.   It only accepts VGA as input and USB as output.  The TwinPact has VGA, Composite, S-Video, and Firewire based input and output.  It also handles audio. Other than the audio, we’ve never had the need to use these alternative inputs.

The lack of additional inputs and outputs means the VGA2USB is much smaller.  It also doesn’t need an external A/C adapter.  It gets power from USB.

The biggest reason for my interest in the VGA2USB is quality (sharpness, color, contrast) of the video.  We often have presenters that put tiny text and diagrams on their slides.  Such items are usually not readable with the TwinPact 100.

To compare the two frame grabbers, I connected the outputs from both the VGA2USB and the TwinPact 100 to a MacBook Pro Core Duo running Wirecast under Mac OS X 10.4.11.  I then connected the inputs to another Mac using a powered VGA splitter.

In Wirecast, I arranged the output video from each unit side-by-side, and set Wirecast to record an h.264 video at high quality at 1280 x 720 pixels.  Using these settings, the Wirecast Mac was only able to muster 6.5 frames per second, but for this test I’m not really interested in frame rate.

Here is the QuickTime video of the results.

I’ve pulled some interesting stills from the video…

Side-by-side comparison of a web page  – This shot shows the comparison of a web page with text and images. The Epiphan is clearly brighter and easier to read. For reasons I’m not sure, the video from the TwinPact is vertically squished.  The right side of the TwinPact is also cropped.  It is possible to do some basic resizing and positioning with the TwinPact remote.  The process is kludgy and if you plug in a different computer, the size and position often need to be fixed all over again.

Screen Motion comparsion – The biggest issue with the VGA2USB is that the video is interlaced. The interlacing is very visible for any motion in the incoming video (presenter moves a window, uses slide transitions, or shows a video clip). Epiphan does make other models of the VGA2USB with progressive output, but they start at twice the cost.

In the above comparison, you can see the quality of the text.  The Epiphan VGA2USB is on the top, the Canopus Twinpact 100 is on the bottom. The VGA2USB is much easier to read.

VGA2USB noise – In this image, you’ll see some noise from the VGA2USB.  Not sure if this is the problem with the driver, hardware, or something else.

There are some other possible issues with the VGA2USB.  At one point in the above video, the output appears blank. This along with the random noise I mention above  At higher resolutions, the frame rate on the low end VGA2USB model goes way down.

In our case, the benefits of a simpler and smaller piece of  hardware with higher quality video out make the VGA2USB an excellent new tool for our Wirecast recording systems.

If you subscribe to the Jones Seminar video podcast, it can automatically be synced to your mobile player. Haven’t you always wanted to get your Jones Seminar fill while riding up the ski lift? I thought so.

The Jones Seminar takes place each Friday, and we try to get the video posted by the following Monday.

To subscribe the Jones Seminar podcast, see the, “Subscribe to our Podcasts” section on the Jones Seminar page.

For more information about Podcasts, see the Podcast page on Wikipedia, or  this FAQ from Apple.

How we did it 

Behind the scenes, the podcast feeds gets created using a combination of a script called “DirCaster” and Feedburner.

Once the video and MP3s are created, we simply drop them in the appropriate folder along with a file containing a little metadata.  DirCaster then dynamically generates the RSS podcast feed based on any media files it finds in the directory.  We use Feedburner in order to keep track of statistics.  With almost no additional work, these tools allow us to automatically deliver fresh videos to you each week.

Our requirements included a solution that:

• could be recorded at a high resolution for viewing later
• showed video of the speaker
• synchronized slides of the presentation
• streamed live to the internet
• simple to use
• have a fall back plan in case something refused to operate
• almost no equipment attendance
• very little post production requirements

Our own additional requirement was a solution that we could use for other purposes such as recording courses, or other Thayer Events.

Evaluating our options

Audio/Video equipment, is notoriously finicky. So meeting all the requirements… without an equipment operator standing by to make sure it was working was a tall order.

The first alternative we came across was a product from RealNetworks called RealPresenter. It allows you to manually synchronize powerpoint slides with video. It was an obvious dead end, as the software had long been abandoned by Real, and it appeared to be a labor intensive task to sync slides to video. However, it was a starting point of what was possible.

It looked like RealPresenter used SMIL which is an open standard. Using very simple SMIL document, I was able to make QuickTime Player play two videos side-by-side in one window. However, not only is SMIL support a little shaky in QuickTime Player and Real Player, the videos are playing independently and there didn’t seem to be a guarantee that they would buffer and start playing at the same time. So they could potentially get out of sync.

We did some other research and found instances of other colleges installing dedicated specialized video equipment for recording courses. As soon as we saw price tags in the 10’s of thousands of dollars, we knew we needed to come up with something cheaper. Before installing permanent expensive equipment, we want to see what is possible, and what sort of demand there is in our community.

A Solution

I finally came across an interesting software product called Wirecast. It was intriguing because it was basically drop-in QuickTime Broadcaster replacement, only much more powerful.

Wirecast can take multiple video inputs, which can be arranged any way you’d like on the screen. Think “picture in picture”, but with much more flexibility. You can predefine these “scenes” and then quickly switch between them with a single click. It also allows you to add titles, still images and pre-made video or audio.

We also needed a way to capture the screen of the presenter’s computer. Wirecast comes with a free piece of software, Desktop Presenter, which handles this. Install it on the presenter’s computer and it will send that screen over the network to Wirecast. It works quite well and the quality is very good. The only problem is that the presenter often shows up moments before the presentation is set to begin. Even if there is time to install Desktop Presenter, sometimes presenters are wary of having software installed on their computer. So we decided to purchase a framegrabber that splits the signal destined for the LCD projector, and converts it to a Firewire feed that we can feed into Wirecast. There don’t seem to be very many options out there for Firewire video framegrabbers. We chose the Canopus TwinPact 100. It is fairly expensive, and the quality is not great, since we are doing a couple analog/digital conversions. However, the convenience of not having to install software on the presenter’s computer makes it a fair trade off.

For a video camera, we chose a Canon HV20. The key feature is an auxiliary mic input. This feature is surprisingly not available on many consumer cameras. The HV20 also has decent low light performance and can record in High Definition. We aren’t using HD at the moment, but may use it in the future. We looked at higher end cameras, however, we decided it would be better to have several cheaper cameras that we could use as backups, rather than fewer higher end cameras. The main advantage of higher end cameras seemed to be better performance in low light, and native XLR audio input which we felt we could make compromises on.

To tie it all together, we need a computer. Encoding video on the fly can be a processor intensive task. After a few false starts, we ended up using a dual processor PowerMac G5 for our fixed set up in our auditorium, and a Core Duo MacBook Pro for a mobile setup. The key to a successful set up is something that can accommodate multiple Firewire buses. The computer and Wirecast get very flaky if you try to have multiple video sources on the same bus. We installed two additional firewire cards in our PowerMac which allows us to use two cameras and the TwinPact framegrabber simultaneously. For the MacBook Pro, we’re using a SIIG Firewire express card. This card works, but has the habit of kernel panicing the machine if it is unplugged while on. We’ve also found that the machine has trouble waking from sleep if the card is plugged in. So extreme caution is necessary.

We already had an Xserve G5 providing streaming with QuickTime Streaming Server. No changes needed to be made to this system… although, at some point we’d like to move this to a Linux Virtual Machine running Darwin Streaming Server.

With all the components selected, it is time to put it all together. Here’s an overview:

Setting Wirecast up is fairly straight forward. After skimming the documentation and playing for a few minutes, you’ll start to get the hang of setting up custom scenes. Below is an example of the setup we use for the Jones Seminar. We place the video from the HV20 on the left, and the video of the presenters computer on the right. This side-by-side setup leaves black bars on the top and bottom (Wirecast can’t output arbitrary aspect ratios) so we just put a static title at the bottom.

We’ve experimented a bit with different broadcast/recording settings. Currently we broadcast one live stream at a lower resolution and simultaneously record a 640 x 480 version to disk. Both streams use the H.264 codec. We’ve found that dropping the frame rate still provides acceptable quality. Because there is very little motion in the video, we’ve gone down as low as 12 frames per second.

Initially, we did no post-production to the video. However, we found that by re-encoding the video, we could reduce the filesize even more. So our original recording is at 24 fps. Then, we re-encode two versions (Currently using QuickTime Pro):

• Large Video: 640 x 480, H.264, 20 FPS, Two Pass encoding, medium compression
• Small Video: 480 x 360, H.264, 15 FPS, Two Pass encoding, medium compression

We also extract the audio and create a 56 kbps MP3.

You can view the results on the Thayer School Jones Seminar page. The later videos use our most recent quality settings.

Since we started using the system for the Jones Seminar, word quickly spread and we are now using the Wirecast system to record a Thayer course, our Energy Symposium, and a handful of other events.

For two events, we’ve used the system to provide overflow rooms using the live internet feed.

After working out a few kinks, we are very pleased with the system. While the system, once set up, is fairly simple, it still has several moving parts. So it probably isn’t a solution that will scale here at Thayer. We have limited staff to support the system, so if more courses and events need to be recorded, we’ll need to come up with a simpler solution. We’ve already started heading down that path using network connected cameras, but I’ll save that for another day.