Galicaster 2.0 Community Edition Released

21 Feb Galicaster 2.0 Community Edition Released

Posted at 10:00h in Galicaster PRO, Lecture Capture, Opencast, Teltek by Vicente Goyanes

The second major release of Galicaster Community, is available !

Galicaster  is a powerful lecture and conference recording software. that, running on the recommended Hardware,  builds a fully featured multi-stream recording unit.

For the past year, we have been working hard at TELTEK to prepare the Galicaster 2.0 Community Edition. At last, we are glad to announce that the time has come for the release of Galicaster 2.0.0, the second major release of Galicaster.

The biggest change has been migrating Galicaster to GStreamer 1.x and GTK 3. GStreamer 1.x comes with several advantages:

  • A more stable, efficient and bug-free software.
  • Access to h264 hardware encoding.
  • Community support
  • Better Blackmagic support.
  • And many more.

 

We have also moved our previous OS requirement from Ubuntu 12.04 to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release. This, although being mostly a consequence of migrating to GStreamer 1.x, comes with the perk of extended Ubuntu support for the next 5 years.

Another big change is our new external plugin architecture and a better designed recorder core, which allows contributing and improving Galicaster in a modular way through external plugins, without having to tinker with the core. This has already brought two more plugins to the Galicaster ecosystem:

  • A PTZ-Control plugin developed by us, with the support of the University of Leipzig, that so far supports the VISCA port and has been tested for the Sony EVI-H100S/H100V. ONVIF support for IP Cams is on progress as well. Repository here: https://github.com/teltek/Galicaster-plugin-cameracontrol

A really big thank you to both institutions for their early interest in Galicaster 2.

To sum up, here are Galicaster 2 main new features:

  • Media engine migration from GStreamer 0.10 to GStreamer 1.x.
  • Base S.O. migration from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 16.04.
  • New external plugins architecture, plugins can now be loaded through pip or from a .deb package.
  • Improved the Lock Screen plugin with LDAP authentication.
  • New PTZ-Control external plugin.
  • New virtual keyboard plugin.
  • Fixed loading translations.
  • New plugin to enable/disable inputs through a button or using the rest API.
  • Added a dual-channel coloured VU-Meter (Mono or Stereo).
  • Using CSS to “style” Galicaster.

See all the changes here: Github CHANGELOG

We are very excited about finally making this release for Galicaster 2.

There are still many more features that we are eager to add, and we can’t wait to work on them during this year. We also believe this new release will make it easier for other people to contribute to Galicaster. We want to take care of the community, and continue working with you to keep making Galicaster better.

If you have any suggestions, questions, etc, about Galicaster 2, feel free to open an issue on Github. Or drop us a line!

Installing and Testing Galicaster 2

As most of you know, from now on we will be providing a signed APT repository for Ubuntu. It will simplify dependency installation and will allow us to also provide external packages when required.

Installing Galicaster 2.0 is much easier now, just add the repository and install:

echo “deb https://packages.galicaster.org/apt xenial main” | sudo tee –append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/galicaster.list

wget -O – https://packages.galicaster.org/apt/galicaster.gpg.key  | sudo apt-key add –

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install galicaster

For those of you who want a complete installation guide, more instructions can be found in the new docs now hosted on Github: https://github.com/teltek/Galicaster-doc/blob/2.0.x/SoftwareInstallation.md

Enjoy Galicaster 2.0 !!

The Galicaster Team.
TELTEK Video Research

Galicaster 2.0 improved Recorder UI