PyCA – Opencast Capture Agent

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

The goals of pyCA are to be…

• flexible for any kind of capture device
• simplistic in code and functionality
• nonrestrictive 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 the Raspberry Pi.

Python Versions

PyCA supports both Python 2 and Python 3. For Python 2, we only support version 2.7, while for Python 3 we test against all recent versions. For a detailed list of supported versions, have a look at the Travis configuration.

While we will continue to support Python 2 until the end of 2019, we recommend using Python 3 if possible.

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.

Starting pyCA

You can start pyCA by running

./start.sh

This start script will take an optional command allowing you to separately launch pyCA services and run them as separate processes. By default (or using the run command) all services except the UI are launced as a single process.

Available commands are:

• run: Start all pyCA components except ui (default)
• capture: Start pyCA capture service
• ingest: Start pyCA ingest service
• schedule: Start pyCA schedule service
• agentstate: Start pyCA agentstate service
• ui: Start web based user interface

As a service

Example systemd unit files, corresponding to the commands above, are available in init/systemd. These unit files start and manage all pyCA services separately to ensures that a problem in one of the services does not effect other parts of pyCA.

Remember to increase the WatchdogSec parameter in the pyca-schedule.service unit file if you modify the update_frequency setting in pyCA, it's recommended to set it at least twice as long as the update_frequency.

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):

./start.sh ui

To production deployment, use a WSGI server instead. A very simple example, using Gunicorn, would be to run:

gunicorn pyca.ui:app

For more information, have a look at the help option of gunicorn or go to the Gunicorn online documentation.

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.

Preview

The web interface can show preview images for running capture processes. To enable this, the capture process must generate these still images and write them to a pre-defined location. An simple example configuration using FFmpeg could look like this:

command          = '''ffmpeg -nostats -re
                      -f lavfi -r 25 -i testsrc
                      -f lavfi -i sine -t {{time}}
                      -map 0:v -map 1:a {{dir}}/{{name}}.webm
                      -map 0:v -r 1 -updatefirst 1 {{previewdir}}/preview.jpg'''

preview = '{{previewdir}}/preview.jpg'

This command will record audio and video from a test source and write a WebM file while simultaneously updating a still image every second.