We are very happy to finally announce the first release of Tobira, the Opencast video portal! 🎉
Tobira aims to be a pleasant interface through which users interact with your Opencast content. It lets you present videos and series in an customizable, hierarchical page structure, but also makes it easy for users to search through all media. Additionally, it offers tools to upload and manage videos. It's possible to connect Tobira to virtually any authentication system and integrate it into your university's/organization's infrastructure.
What does the 1.0 milestone mean for this project? Well, this is mainly about promising some form of stability and to make updates easier. Until now, upgrading from one Tobira version to another basically meant wiping your DB. Not great! For more information on what exactly we promise not to break, see our versioning policy.
For more information about Tobira itself, how to deploy it, and more: see the README and the docs/ folder.
If you've already been using Tobira, you might have noticed that Tobira now uses the Paella player for all videos, not just dual stream ones. This was a last minute decision by the folks at ETH and Bern University. We might still introduce alternative players in the future – nothing is settled in that regard. Unfortunately, Paella seems to have problems playing quite a few videos on our test deployment: they play without sound and 0:00 is shown as duration. Let's hope that this bug is fixed soon!
Of course, this hardly marks the end of development for Tobira; not at all! We have lots of features, improvements and design changes planned for the future. So keep an eye out for future releases.