Greg's dashboard

Will,

I don't have any experience with the Datapath cards, so I can't comment on their relative performance. Maybe someone else on GetSat can comment. – Greg, on October 23, 2009 17:55

Hi Will,

I just used the VGA2USB to capture a conference, so I thought I'd add my 2c.

The device was unusable on my Windows 7 laptop, with a startup latency on the order of a minute. This is probably a driver problem. I was able to use the device with a backup XP machine just fine, with a startup time of a couple seconds.

I did not have control over the resolutions the presenters were using, and the quality of capture varied greatly depending on the resolution chosen. On some talks, there was a distracting screen-like effect, where the image appeared slightly broken up and shimmered. On another, there was a black border about 25% of the image size in width. For resolutions in the "sweet spot", static content looked good, but any motion produced very pronounced interlacing artifacts.

If you capturing static content on XP, and can control the resolution coming into the device, the VGA2USB may be sufficient for your needs. If you need more flexibility and higher quality, the LR may be able to handle higher resolutions, and probably offloads more of the processing burden from the PC.

-Greg

Dave is correct. Views and Unique Users are reported live, while Minutes Viewed will be updated overnight for our hosted platform.

For standalone CourseCast sites, the lag time is on the order of 2hrs.

The next release of CourseCast will include a "current as of" date for minutes viewed to make this more transparent.

-Greg

Pete,

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, do the solutions I mentioned (link out of admin interface and eventual merging of views) sound like they'll resolve this issue?

Thanks,
-Greg

Hi Pete,

I agree that navigation between the student and administrative views is pretty awkward.

It is actually the same login between pages, but the only link out of the admin interface logs you out, which is why you're seeing the repeat login in the student view.

If you just cut the URL down to http://[server]/CourseCast, you can navigate to the student view without forcing a logout.

I've tentatively added a "Home" link to the administrative page, which will allow you to switch to the student view more easily. This ought to make it into the next minor release.

Longer term, we expect to consolidate the various views into a single unified, searchable view. This would likely be part of a major release.

Thanks for the feedback,
-Greg