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

	Firefox	Chrome	Edge	Safari
Windows 11	✔3	✔	✔	-
Windows 10	✔3	✔	✔	-
Linux	✔3	✔4	✔4	-
macOS	✔3	✔4	✔4	🔶5
iOS	- 1	- 1	- 1	🔶2
Android	🔶2	🔶2	🔶2	-

¹ Non-Safari browser on iOS use the Safari browser engine, so behave essentially the same as Safari.

² Screen share on mobile devices not supported; only webcam recording.

³ Display audio capture only possible through the use of "monitor sources" as microphone.

⁴ Display audio capture only possible if sharing a tab, not the entire screen or individual application windows.

⁵ Display audio capture not supported.

Usage

There are mainly three ways how to use Opencast Studio.

Integrated in Opencast

Starting with Opencast 8.2, Opencast Studio is integrated into and shipped with Opencast itself. If you have an Opencast system already, this is the easiest solution for you. See the Opencast documentation about the module 'studio' for more information.

Standalone Version at studio.opencast.org

Opencast Studio is always deployed from master branch.

You are free to use the publicly deployed version. However, there are two caveats.

For one, studio.opencast.org is updated fairly regularly with the newest version and is not tested as thoroughly as the Studio version integrated into Opencast releases. That means that it might occasionally not work or introduce backwards incompatible changes (mostly related to settings) at any time.

Additionally, in order to upload to your 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 standalone version

As Studio is a client-only application, you can simply build it and then serve the resulting static files.

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:release   # or npm run build:dev for development

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 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:release

Option	Example	Description
PUBLIC_PATH	/studio	Path from which Studio will be served
SETTINGS_PATH	/mysettings.toml	Path from which to load the configuration (see CONFIGURATION.md for more information)
INCLUDE_LEGAL_NOTICES	1	Set to 1 to include legal notices and information about ELAN e.V., any other value or having this variable not set will not include them. Unless you are working for ELAN e.V. there is probably no reason for you to use this variable.