When I came to this group, the only lecture capture appliance they had was a Crestron CaptureHD unit installed in our large (400+) auditorium. It had been there for about a year and was used to make some test recordings but not much else. An AV tech pacing back and forth, waving at the camera and tapping the microphone isn’t a real world use case scenario so I did some testing to see if it could be viable for larger scale use at Notre Dame.

I used to it record one class for an entire semester. To distribute the files I had the CaptureHD box upload them to an FTP server. From there, I downloaded them to my laptop and then uploaded them to our Echo360 server (currently in pilot). It encoded the files and placed them in a course which I specified. Access to the files was provided via an LTI integration between our LMS (Sakai) and Echo360. It’s a manual process but not difficult. Not at all scalable though.

While it’s a neat product and has some promise, it’s just not ready for prime time. Here were some of the limitations I found:

• Couldn’t integrate with our Exchange or room reservation system (Not a deal breaker)
• It records to an SD card and then transfers the files to an FTP server but it has no support for SFTP. That didn’t make our infosec guys happy. This has recently been rectified but the firmware release that added SFTP had other issues.
• I had numerous issues with the device:
  • Occasional lockups on boot.
  • Some firmware versions would not pull metadata from the Fusion server to which is communicates.
  • Weird issues with recording not stopping at the correct time if it was a recurring recording.
  • Difficulty in scheduling recordings on the Fusion server.
• It records both content sources (video and content) as one video stream, not 2. That means that if you record it in PIP mode, that’s the only way you can ever watch it. No resizing the windows or swapping them. Same thing with side by side or only one type of content.
• It can’t stream and record simultaneously.
• No content distribution mechanism. You get the files and they can compress them on their server into a multitude of formats, but then you have to figure out what to do with them and how to secure them. Not ideal for a low-touch process in higher-ed without a lot of custom development.

If you had no other options and didn’t care about delivering the files being a manual process, this would be fine. I’m not sure it’s worth the cost but it’s certainly viable.

I love Crestron control systems and switching gear and I’m DMCE certified so don’t take this as bashing their product. This is just one of those products that’s outside their core-competency and therefore not likely to get the time and attention it needs to succeed. I bet they drop it within 2 years. That being said: I hope they prove me wrong!

The next step was evaluating other options.