Copyright © 2012 Kaltura Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.
Use of this web site constitutes acceptance of the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
EduVideo.org
Problems with Kaltura CE v5 Eagle
Thu, 04/19/2012 - 03:55
So reading through these forums I'm seeing all kinds of people reporting similar kinds of breakage, the same problems being reported repeatedly, and nobody on the team responding to them.
There's a thing at the top that says "we will make sure that you get an answer within a few days tops", but that's clearly not happening - not even a "That shouldn't be happening, not sure why, don't have time to trouble-shoot, sorry".
What's going on? Have you guys given up? Are you actually serious about Kaltura CE?
I understand that when we're using a free product you sometimes get put in the queue behind paid customers, but it would be good if we could at least get some idea what to expect - if it's completely unsupported and you don't intend to help, just say so. Or if you can't help without payment, point us towards your paid support option.
Without any idea what's going on there, all we can do is suggest to clients that they stay away from Kaltura, paid or free.
Sat, 04/21/2012 - 15:16
#2
ed_1 you are absolutely correct in all your assumptions!!!
We have already steered a large number of our clients away from Kaltura paid and CE as its obviously a joke!
We've also decided to look for an alternative solution for our project, as its obvious the Kaltura CE project is there to frustrate the Open source solution and force people that want Kaltura to the expensive paid version!
Very Very disappointing!
Sat, 04/21/2012 - 18:57
#3
To be fair I feel that these sentiments are exaggerated. I've been working with KalturaCE since it's earliest days and have found it to be a viable open source solution for media management. The learning curve may be steeper than other open source projects I've worked with, but that should be an expectation when the size and complexity of the underlying technology is considered. The devs, while not hyperactive on these community forums, step in often with factual and concise answers to some of the more difficult challenges that we users face, frequently illustrating the coding conventions and methodologies that define the inner workings of their product. I have seen that the community here is alive with helpful people offering real world solutions and practical examples, and have myself been able to leverage this freely available knowledge to build solutions that would otherwise be far out of my reach both with respect to financial and coding ability. The fact is that KalturaCE remains the only open source project of this size, scope and ability among media management platforms, and to claim that its sole purpose is to drive people to open their wallets is, in my humble opinion, unfounded.
Sun, 04/22/2012 - 09:31
#4
rtcwp07,
Your comments would normally be fair but!, issues and problems raised in CE4 are now being raised in CE5!
Also CE5 VMware install doesn't work!
Now if as you say Devs aren't hyperactive then they should be when the same problems exists and they cant even get a working VM version published!
I reiterate why don't they get the theoretical working Kaltura.com version into CE and start from a apparent working and reliable version?????
Come on Kalturian this is the time to revitalise your tarnished credibility!
rtcwp07 if you don't think the perceived deliberate drive to the paid version isn't valid then get them to publish the working Kaltura.com version to CE! Challenge!
Mon, 04/23/2012 - 11:07
#5
@rtcwp07 maybe you can help us with some information about to get the analytics up and running in CE 5?
Thats one of the things i have to complain about here on kaltura.org, there are a few main issues asked over and over again, but no statement from kaltura how to solve that problems.
There must be no detailed How To, but getting some hints from kaltura would make it easier for everyone here to figure things out.
Saying nothing or making a statement, coming soon, and after 1,5 years there are still no answers to frequently asked questions, that directs this so called community to a dead end.
Yes, kaltura is in first place a commercial company, but using the open source thought so excessive for marketing purpose they should be able to give a little bit more back then an nearly undocumented piece of software (wich is basically a really great software, when using the SaaS Service).
If all the open source projects kaltura built their service on, wouldn't had the bad documentation or community kaltura wouldn't exist either, as they would stopped using their software.
Maybe we can get some Feedback from kaltura to these general community issues as well, a community lives from dialouge. Let's get one started.
Mon, 04/23/2012 - 14:36
#6
the VM Image and download packs are FUBAR, you have to manually install using the SVN that works great if you prepare the prerequisites.
I got the RTMP streaming going even, but instructions for CE5 aren't out had to use CE4 instructions and some guess work since code's been moved around lol
Mon, 04/23/2012 - 15:18
#7
Getting the system up and running is not the problem. But configure all modules so that they are running properly is nearly impossible.
The RTMP Streaming works fine for me using a CDN for delivery. But no stats, and i'm trying to get this running since 2 days.
Also i have no clue how to integrate the CDN logfiles for bandwith analysis. There is a thread from 2010, wich is saying a documentation is coming in one of the next releases, 2 new releases later there is still no such documentation.
Mon, 04/23/2012 - 18:10
#8
agregorian -- I'm curious; if you're not using Kaltura then what are you recommending to clients? I'm about to launch a project where I thought Kaltura CE would be perfect, but not I'm not so sure.
Am pulling the svn though to see what I can do with it.
Tue, 04/24/2012 - 01:52
#9
OK, so what to do?
The problem here is the combination of poor communication and flakey releases.
In Free Software we can often get around one of those two. If the communication isn't good, the software often tells its own story, and people can help each other figure out what it's supposed to do. If the releases don't work seamlessly, you can usually get somebody to talk you through it as long as the devs chip in when there's a question nobody can answer. But with both of those things being broken, you end up with a bunch of people groping around in the dark and saying, "I don't know either", which is what we've got here.
On top of this, the actual forums seem to be set up to positively repel useful support. It took me days to get to even be able to post because the introduction email didn't say I had to validate before I could post, and the forums didn't tell me why I couldn't post. The "contact us" form was broken. (I eventually got a reply on Twitter, after lots of bitching and nagging.) Now I'm in, I can't see how to subscribe to the whole forum (as opposed to individual threads) so if I learn some things about Kaltura that might help other people, but don't make a positive effort to keep coming back to the forum, those other people are just going to end up screaming into a void as well.
It's pretty much a checklist of how to screw up a FOSS project.
On the plus side, we've got some software that does something there's loads of demand for (I'm guessing the reason why support for CE sucks so badly is that they're swamped with paying business), some people sound like they're getting it working to their satisfaction, and Kaltura have kindly published the source code that they spent a lot of money developing, which we can merrily copy, fix and fork.
Assuming Kaltura aren't going to do anything to fix this situation, what can we do about it? Maybe it would help to just work around what they've set up for support completely? Set up an unofficial Kaltura Community site, use a regular mailing list that people stay subscribed to, make a wiki to support the thing, and if necessary fork the codebase?
Tue, 04/24/2012 - 10:21
#10
Hi guys,
You've raised a lot of issues in this thread and i'll try to address as many as i can.
1. Kaltura CE and Kaltura SaaS are using the same code base, but comparing Kaltura CE to Kaltura.com is something that shouldn't be done.
Kaltura.com is a complex system with dozens of server which are updated and maintained on a daily basis, with a known set of configurations, on specific versions of Apache, PHP, Sphinx, ..., and specific Linux distributions.
Kaltura CE is a stand alone project that should be easy to install from scratch, used on all sort of configurations, Linux distributions and using a single server for the entire Kaltura platform.
As you can see they are 2 different projects, in general Kaltura CE and Kaltura.com are the same code but very different configurations.
so please stop asking for the Kaltura.com version... there isn't some secret code or a special flag we keep from you.
2. We are working hard on fixing the installation issues, releasing documentation while supporting the forums, we are trying our best to solve these issues, while just reproducing the issue could take days.
3. I personally wrote about how to integrate Kaltura CE and Red5, including a video tutorial and had to hack into Red5 code to make it work. I also released installation video for CE 4.0.
CE 5.0 videos will be released after we fix the installation issues that rose when releasing CE 5.0.
4. We released our knowledge center site: knowledge.kaltura.com, where you can find good information about Kaltura.
We are adding more content to it every day on all subjects - from developer related articles to content managers articles.
5. We are revamping Kaltura.org site and fixing all the mentioned issues.
To conclude:
I know that Kaltura CE isn't perfect but Kaltura has a growing and amazing community and i'm proud to work as a community manager for Kaltura, knowing i do my best to help Kaltura community.
Believe me when i say that CE purpose is not to push people into Kaltura.com, but to create a real Open Source community.
Tue, 04/24/2012 - 12:53
#11
Hi Ronileco,
thx for your answer. I agree to you if you are saying setting up an running instance of kaltura CE is no problem. It's quite easy at all, if you have a little knowledge of linux. So people complaining about this should, maybe, put more effort in linux basics.
I also recognized your contribution like the Red5 integration and so on.
But i have to disagree with your view on the community, i personally think it could grow much faster if there would be more effort to give more basic Documentation. By that i don't mean more support by giving demo scripts or description of a given API, every developer with a liltte experience should get the required info from the documentation.
But it's nearly impossible for the community to get behind the scenes of the service, i know it is complex and not easy to communicate.
Don't take this as an attack on your task as a community manager, but why is there so often no response?
Actually i can figure out a few hot topics in the CE Edition Forums
- How to delete video from Kaltura (dealbreaker for live environment)
- How to get statistics running (dealbreaker for live environment)
- Kaltura CE limitation (dealbreaker for live environment)
- How to remove SEO link spam tags
What i will say, you don't have to give a video tutorial or a step by step guid, but pointing the community in the right direction by telling them, "hey have a look at that files and that db_table is related to your problem" it would help massivley.
Tue, 04/24/2012 - 13:47
#12
Likewise - I've been trying to get an answer on the 508 player, which is a deal-breaker for my client.
I know that the answer to how to get this thing working may be complex, and there may be some kind of difficult issue behind my problem. But I haven't even been able to get an answer to whether this is a feature that is actually supposed to be there, or whether it requires some kind of extra install, or something that I need to configure, or what. I don't know whether I should spend more time fiddling with my client's install, or whether it's a complete waste of time.
I'm not asking for comprehensive solutions to all the problems we may run into. I'm just asking for a minimal level of communication. What's supposed to work? What's a known bug? What's something that you intend to look into, but won't realistically be able to fix for a while?
If things don't always work the first time, the community can help make them better. But if we run into a brick wall when we try to figure out why they don't work, we can't.
Tue, 10/09/2012 - 15:47
#13
Hello,
after 10 days of tries I have a question only:
can CE 5 + red5 + Centos6.3 works?
red5 (is running perfectly) needs some particular configuration/permissions to work with CE5?
@Ronileco, tnx for your video tutorial on CE4, can you post the same for CE5 (I saw many differerence between 4 and 5). I see you are very satisfied in your video .... can you make us happy too? ;)
When I try to preview rtmp I have "file not found" and in /opt/kaltura/log/kaltura_apache_errors.log "File does not exist: /opt/kaltura/app/alpha/web/open"
Sorry for my bad english.
Thu, 10/18/2012 - 10:12
#14
This configuration should work as well as any other, I'm sure i've done it at least once.
To solve your file not found error, i would look in your links and configurations.
See that the directory do exist or maybe try to link the web folder into Klatura real web folder.
Anyway try to understand why it searches the content on 'opt/kaltura/app/alpha/web/open', tell you the truth never went into that folder and it is possible you misconfigured something or have a bad link.
regarding the happy part, I did the recording live, didn't knew if it will work until i saw myself smiling :), i had to remove some parts where I laugh too much.
Anyway I'm not working for Kaltura anymore, although I really want to make the video for CE5, hope I can do that sometimes and post it on my blog: www.ronileco.com where I post a lot about Kaltura.
No promises here for videos although I'm trying to get there.
Mon, 11/12/2012 - 00:02
#15
So the community expert is no longer working for Kaltura and is making no promises. Did they hire a new community manager? Or has this thread ultimately proven itself.
Thu, 11/22/2012 - 00:33
#16
all - between investing a great deal of time and resources into making Kaltura as amazing as it is, and maintaining the knowledge center on http://knowledge.kaltura.com, there's very little time left to answering every user's questions on the forums.
Granted, it is important and we do our best to keep up, this is also where you as a community member have the opportunity to become involved and pitch in, help others and share your knowledge.
Thu, 11/22/2012 - 18:38
#17
Please see the improvements in source code delivery and maintenance with CE6: http://www.kaltura.org/installing-kaltura-ce-6-falcon-github
our packaging and installation open source repositories now reflect changes from our internal repositories in near real time.
this should allow us to maintain or CE installations with easier bug fix updates and, hopefully, version upgrades with greater ease.
I personally apologize for not keeping up with CE5 support requests as we made what I consider necessary and difficult updates to our source release infrastructure.
please let me know of any errors you find when trying out the new system,
unfortunately I will not be able to offer support for CE5 (though I want to be able to provide a clear upgrade path from CE5--if any of you are willing to give me a clone of a CE5 install to use during development of this process, i'll give it a go)
--Andrew
Wed, 01/09/2013 - 13:44
#18
@pixel-ink
- How to delete video from Kaltura - Deletion of entries existed in Kaltura since always. what exactly is your issue here?
- How to get statistics running - Install the latest version, make sure your prerequisites are setup correctly and everything should work well.
- Kaltura CE limitation - what exactly is your question here?
- How to remove SEO link spam tags - check out the util file at: https://github.com/kaltura/KalturaServer/blob/master/scripts/utils/setIg...
Wed, 03/27/2013 - 14:25
#19
what is the best red5 version to integrate with kaltura CE5 on centos 5.9??
Thu, 03/28/2013 - 13:37
#20
i've installed kaltura CE 5 and red5 0.9.1 on my server
configured the integrations as mentioned in the videos
webcam is working fine
and rtmp is being delivered as well
but creating live stream entry is being stuck with provisioning!! it doesn't get ready or error just provisioning
does anyone knows what could be wrong??
Thu, 04/04/2013 - 20:59
#21
Hi laylash.work,
You can use the livestream service to create manual live streams (select stream type to be manual)
Or change the provisioning code like in CE4 although I wouldn't recommend that.
sent you a PM