PyCA – Opencast Capture Agent

https://travis-ci.org/opencast/pyCA.svg?branch=master

https://coveralls.io/repos/github/opencast/pyCA/badge.svg?branch=master

PyCA is a fully functional Opencast [OC] capture agent written in Python. It is free software licenced under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License [LGPL].

The goals of pyCA are to be…

flexible for any kind of capture device

simplistic and minimalistic in code and functionality

unrestrictive in terms of choosing capture software

PyCA can be run on almost any kind of devices: A regular PC equipped with capture cards, a server to capture network streams, small boards or embedded devices like Raspberry Pi [RPi], Beagleboard, Cubieboard, …

Backup Mode

By setting backup_mode = True in the configuration file, the PyCA will go into a backup mode. This means that capture agent will neither register itself at the Opencast core, nor try to ingest any of the recorded media or set the capture state. This is useful if the CA shall be used as backup in case a regular capture agent fails to record (for whatever reasons). Just match the name of the pyCA to that of the regular capture agent.

Installation

Here is a short summary for Debian based OS like Raspian:

git clone https://github.com/opencast/pyCA.git
cd pyCA
apt-get install python-configobj python-dateutil python-pycurl \
  python-flask python-sqlalchemy
vim etc/pyca.conf <-- Edit the configuration
./start.sh

On Fedora:

git clone https://github.com/opencast/pyCA.git
cd pyCA
dnf install python-pycurl python-dateutil python-configobj \
  python-flask python-sqlalchemy
vim etc/pyca.conf <-- Edit the configuration
./start.sh

On RHEL/CentOS 7:

git clone https://github.com/opencast/pyCA.git
cd pyCA
yum install python-pycurl python-dateutil python-configobj \
  python-flask python-sqlalchemy
vim etc/pyca.conf  <-- Edit the configuration
./start.sh

On Arch Linux:

git clone https://github.com/opencast/pyCA.git
cd pyCA
sudo pacman -S python-pycurl python-dateutil \
  python-configobj python-sqlalchemy
vim etc/pyca.conf  <-- Edit the configuration
./start.sh

…or use the available [AUR] package. Note that Arch Linux uses Python 3.5 by default, so this method will use Python 3.5 for pyCA as well.

User Interface

PyCA comes with a web interface to check the status of capture agent and recordings. It is built as WSGI application and can be run using many different WSGI servers (Apache httpd + mod_wsgi, Gunicorn, …).

For testing, it also comes with a minimal built-in server. Note that it is meant for testing only and should not be used in production. It will also listen to localhost only. To start the server, run (additional to pyCA):