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.
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 for some time, we recommend using Python 3 if possible.
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.
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.
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.