MediaPortal at Georgia Educational Technology Conference (1 Viewer)

[agayton]

I am presenting at the GaETC conference this week on how MediaPortal could be used in a school to manage the TV recording, media storage and retrieval, and classroom access to applications and content. I realize that this falls outside of the intent of the program (as a home entertainment solution) so I wanted to get opinions from those of you who are involved in the development of the project. I want to make sure that I express correctly the devolpment team's view on what would be supported and what they will be on their own with.

Would I be correct in saying that schools would recieve help in areas that are normal functions of the software but are more on their own if they attempt to do things like running really large numbers of slaves and clients?

I am also guessing that this forum will be glad to have the technical support folks participate and contribute but I should probably discourage individual teachers from flooding this place?

Is there anything else that they should know?

If anyone has used it in an educational environment I would love to know what your thoughts are: what works well, what challenges you faced, what pluggins are good to use.

Thanks,

ag

 

[deebo]

mediaportal is too much of a hobby project - atleast for now - to be used in a demanding situation like that

its like a pet, it needs constant care or it will die

 

[agayton]

deebo,

I would agree, for now, but the potential is there. MediaPortal is getting so many great features and the three systems I have running are pretty stable. Thanks to the folks on this forum, I have been able to tweak things to the point where my home system has become a "daily driver".

Part of this conference is to introduce new ideas to educators. I want to show them how this system could be used. I will not be recommending that they run out and set up a massive TVServer Master Slave system with MediaPortal clients right away. Most of the folks at this conference will be techs, tech directors, and other technology leaders. Exposing them to MediaPortal will get the ball rolling and I think can add good people to this group. Schools face some pretty tough issues when it comes to media distribution. They first have to deal with some tough legal issues, but then they have budget issues as well. Most media distribution solutions start around the 30k range and get higher from there.

They also have platform issues to deal with. I looked at some of the other solutions (Myth and GB-PVR) but most schools don't have folks who know Linux, there is not a good Myth pc client yet, and GB-PVR is closed source. Since most schools in Georgia are Windows based, MediaPortal is an obvious choice.

No, I don't see schools moving to this right away, but they need to start looking at it now so that they will be ready when the time comes. Schools are starting to move to the idea of ubiquitous computing and an interface like MediaPortal's will get them farther in that direction than anything they use now.

thanks,
ag

 

[mzemina]

Maybe this presentation could be the start with getting the word out to more developers and MP could have an off-shoot sub-project which could make the needed enhancements made to look toward your end goals!

 

[agayton]

There are a lot of tech savvy folks there. Many of which are probably not aware of this software. Some of us educational people live in our own little educational software world So it is my hope that I can bring in new people to the project.

I am not a programmer. I live more in the routers, servers, and hardware world, but I am hoping I can interest some of the folks at the conference to put together a group to support bringing MediaPortal into education. Many of these tech folks have some progamming skills so perhaps we can get them involved in the main project. I could see a sub-project as a valid way to meet the distinct needs of the educational world, but I don't want to do anything that would take away from the main project. The perfection of the Master/Slave TVServer gets a long way toward offering what retail solutions provide. Combined with high capacity streaming, we should be good to go.

Perhaps, if the need was there for specific features, those could be accomplished by plugins. I we did see the need for a subproject, I would want to get the developers' blessings before we undertake any coding. I would also say that if we produced anything that it would always be submitted back to the main project.

I don't want to make anyone mad and I am not a fan of forks.

Thanks,
ag

 

[agayton]

update: post conference

The presentation went very well. I had about 30 mostly tech folks in the audience and at the end I had several folks say they were going to move to MediaPortal for their home solution and begin looking at it for projects in their schools. We may also be at the starting point for creating an organization to support open source software in Georgia schools. This would be a wonderful thing.

Thank you to the developers for all your hard work on this latest release.

ag

 

[tourettes]

Nice to hear that the presentation went well.