Matterhorn: Open source lecture recording tool

After more than a year of research and development, the Opencast project under the patronage of the University of California Berkeley has presented the Matterhorn 1.0 lecture recording system. The German (virtUOS) Centre for Information Management and Virtual Teaching at the University of Osnabrück was a major contributor to this undertaking.

The free open source software can be used to capture time-controlled images from several cameras as well as the lecturer's computer screen. The system sorts the material into video portals, learning platforms or data storage media for editing.

Developed mainly by the Osnabrück team, the video player allows users to navigate, edit and search the recorded material. According to virtUOS the player supports accessibility settings, which particularly help students who have trouble attending lectures due to physical disabilities. Matterhorn supports various video formats and allows extensive analyses of the captured material. If required the processing load can be shared across multiple computers.

Thirteen US and European institutions cooperate on the Opencast project. The bulk of the development work is done at the University of California Berkeley, the ETH Zurich, the University of Osnabrück and the University of Saskatchewan.

(djwm)