A web-based recording studio for Opencast.

Important note for developers: currently, we are redesigning Studio completely. This will change a lot of code. So please do not start writing a patch for Studio now. At least talk to us first.

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.

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.

There are mainly three ways how to use Opencast Studio.

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.

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;
}

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

See CONFIGURATION.md.

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.

To build Studio yourself, execute these commands:

% git clone [email protected]: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

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