5 months ago I wrote a post about the beginning stages of our experimentation with Kaltura to provide an open source video management solution on our campus. The possibilities were extremely promising with the ability to stop offloading video hosting by faculty and students to third-parties like YouTube. The built-in support for media RSS feeds would be great for migrating the limited iTunes U content we had. And even today while playing around I managed to do some really amazing things using drop folders to grab archives of live-streamed video and publish it to a site. But the honeymoon didn’t last long and while previously getting things to work was mostly an annoyance I’m convinced after conversations today that Kaltura has very little interest in contributing to the open source version of their software. Any university considering using their product should consider the open-source version to be extremely limited and purposefully hindered to provoke people towards Kaltura’s hosted and paid solutions.
What an odd message for a piece of software running on our own server with no bandwidth limitations.
Let’s start with the hidden SEO spam links in embeds. One of the most common uses we had for Kaltura was simply to upload video files and get an embed code. Yet right away I noticed that every embed code included several links back to Kaltura that were trying to provide Google-juice on a bunch of search terms for video management solutions. Take a look at this screenshot from the UMW Great Lives archived videos page to see how this denigrates the experience.
Notice how every single excerpt begins with these spammy titles? That’s the video embedded at the top of the post. Doing a search on how to remove these links brings up a forum post here from 2008 back on their old closed forum where a user complained of the unethical behavior. Their response?
We follow strict guidelines and make sure to include only highly relevant links that do not harm any of our publishers or Kaltura itself. Being open source anyone can remove the links, as well as change any other portion of the code.
Anyone can remove the links, and yet no information was given on how to do that. In fact I can’t find that information anywhere, only complaints from the community Kaltura claims they value. Funny that after 4 years they haven’t decided to act on any of those complaints and remove such an unethical practice. Their “Senior Director of Community” even tells me this isn’t a valid problem in their eyes because the forum link is old and again anyone can remove them.
@timmmmyboy red msg on header, that site was closed in 2008. U should use kaltura.org/forum was there a recent prob this thread about?
— Zohar Babin (@zohar) January 9, 2013
@timmmmyboy Sorry it was rough 4u, but U keep raising old threads Chk v6: 508 was in 5, links R valid schema.org stndrd u can remv
— Zohar Babin (@zohar) January 9, 2013
Here’s a hint to all you budding “Community Managers” out there. Don’t treat me like a dumbass. If all you have in response to criticism is corporate bullshit than save it for another day and don’t waste my time injecting your two cents into a civil thread about media servers under the guise of wanting to “reach out and see if there was any help you could provide.” If a company wanted to really have a customer service win they would tell their Community Guru Nutjobs to get off Twitter and start responding to forum posts and emails with actual solutions to problems people face. If you’re defending your product on Twitter you’ve already lost.
Kaltura proudly proclaims that they have a 508 compliant player for accessibility on the web. Since I wanted to try out providing closed captions with videos I paid for a program that would write the necessary SRT files, uploaded them, and attached them to the video. And yet when looking around to find that “508 Player” that had the closed captioning toggles I couldn’t find it anywhere. I wasn’t alone. According to this thread there are a lot of people who don’t think it’s in the install at all. That thread is 8 months old and doesn’t have a single response from a developer for a feature that they claim exists in their software. Sound suspect to you?
I could go on and on with the various headaches that I’ve dealt with, giving this piece of software one pass after another but after my back and forth with them on Twitter this evening I’ve realized life is too short to give a shit. Don’t waste your time with Kaltura. Here’s a conversation I had with a few folks that includes links to a few other options I’ll be exploring over the next few months:
Tim, what a disappointment. They use Kaltura at one of the schools here, and I had hoped to get in on it. Darn.
Maybe you'll have better support for it on your campus. They might also be using a paid version. This post was a reaction to the poor implementation and support of their Community Edition (the open source free version). Honestly as of yesterday I was still willing to keep plugging away at it and resolving the issues, but then their Director of Community decided to chastise me on Twitter for ranting and complaining instead of searching their forums and contributing to the project. I think now my time is better spent finding a better solution. -Tim
Hi Tim,
I also had some issues to with the CE but I think they are mostly just teething problems due to a new release, the migration of the code to github and changes to the installation process. It has been a frustrating experience but I have finally managed to get a relatively stable install after many days, so have hope that this will be a good solution for us. Looking forward to seeing what other options you discover.
Also from your twitter ‘conversation’ about the 508 player, it is as easy as enabling it in the admin section and then you have it as an option:
http://cl.ly/image/2M1Z0Z3p0r0t
Cheers
I see you're using version 6. I actually had version 5 installed (which was the most recent version as of last semester). Even though they say the 508 player is included in 5 it doesn't show up, even though I had the option checked in the admin panel. Hope your experience is better than ours was. We've moved on to trying some other options. -Tim
Hey Tim,
Thank you for posting this thread, you might want to update it with the rest of our conversation where I also provided you links to the discussions about the 508 player and how to remove the SEO links.
Setting aside my affiliation with Kaltura the company, on Twitter, I chose to respond from my personal account to sincerely learn about the problems you faced and potentially help you resolve them. Yet, all through our Twitter ‘conversation’ you kept pointing to months and years old discussions, rather than moving ahead with a new forum thread or simply request for assistance, reminder: for the problems you did raise, I answered with resolutions, there and then.
To your complaint about support –
No one is getting paid for providing free support, and even so, on the Kaltura CE forum – http://bit.ly/kalturaCEforum you will not find even a single post from the past month without a closure or followup. Did you even try to post a sincere problem recently, did you private message someone from the core team or community experts? did you send an email? a facebook group message? posted a twitter question?
The first message on your Twitter thread was: “It is maddening how little support there is for Kaltura. They might as well close the open source component and call it a day.”
You should note that CE is nothing less than Kaltura. There’s only one trunk, no code diff or like you imply ‘intentional limitations’. On the contrary – Kaltura CE is as robust and scalable as our SaaS. The breadth of implementations from universities to commercial companies goes to show that.
Cheers,
Zohar
You didn\’t provide any link on how to fix the seo spam. You defended the practice and then told me to run a search to find and remove the links myself. The 508 player you linked to this thread where the dev says to enable it, which was the first thing I tried. You told me to upgrade to version 6 even though there\’s no documentation on the site on how to do so. Then you told me instead of complaining I should write the documentation.
Honestly I\’ve spent 6 months working on the install, fixing my own problems, doing the searches, the forum posts, just as you seem to think I\’m incapable of doing. 2 days ago I was still willing to do all that because I do understand that it\’s an open source product. But then you decided my problems were unique to my inability to search and that my problems were just \”rants\” and I should stop \”complaining\”. I expect you to defend your employer. What I can\’t stand is you pretending the problem is me. This thread clearly shows a lot of frustration from others at the level of support you all offer. Maybe you\’re turning over a new leaf and hoping if everyone upgrades to 6 you can start fresh. If so spend more time in the forums and less time defending Kaltura and chastising users on Twitter. I\’ve already decided I want nothing to do with your project as a result of these interactions.
“You didn\’t provide any link on how to fix the seo spam.”
https://twitter.com/timmmmyboy/status/288850999517511680
It’s very comfortable to ignore the rest of the conversation, where I linked to my comment to your old thread, which, was more about complaining than request for help (I even had to change it’s title to be relevant) -
http://www.kaltura.org/problems-kaltura-ce-v5-eagle#comment-10235
Upgrade path – https://github.com/kaltura/ce-packager/issues/18
Kaltura is not WordPress. It is a very robust software, involving many different pieces, from managing transcoding engines, through indexing of complex (and undefined) metadata structures, analytics and more.
With robustness, often comes slower pace of “making things easy” on the IT side.
Upgrade is indeed a need that is missing from Kaltura, and yes, Kaltura provide a commercial license where our team will do the upgrade for you (and it’s as complicated as the instructions provided on the forums).
You keep coming back to how we don’t care, and yet, I am here (and was here since the start of your Twitter thread, despite of your personal attacks). *And ALL* of your complaints so far have been either to a missing feature (simple upgrade path is a feature), a potential bug (508 doesn’t work for you) or your personal [dis]taste of how Kaltura is hard to install.
It is your responsibility, as a user and community member, just as it’s Kaltura’s responsibility as the project leader to be engaged and surface the problems in good faith. Keep things in proportions buddy.Try posting a bug on the issue queue, or patch, try getting involved with the community before you launch attacks at people who work so hard at giving you an amazing software.
[...] outlook that follows I later found the information available for supporting it extremely poor. I wrote about that here if you’d like to read [...]
I absolutely second Tim. I recently not only evaluated Kaltura CE 5.0 but building state-of-art transcoding infrastructure. Fortunately or unfortunately, CE is chosen for obvious reasons, despite the evaluation showed poor stability and buggy software. I am still to understand, Kaltura claims that their SaaS version uses exactly the same code but fixed to resolve issues. How the hell they are keeping all those, while the software is under AGPL. Hate Kaltura … Totally unstable … Forum with only questions … BAD SOFTWARE. BTB, I am no dumb novice of Open source software solution developer. My verdict, avoid it if you can …
Tim,
Coming from a company who is also running CE I have to respectfully disagree with your general attitude. The community managers have been more than fair in my experience and Zohar has even made time for us to meet and strategize.
Community directors aren’t there to custom code everyone’s problems away, it’s more to guide in the right direction and give extra expertise when possible. There are many freelance Kaltura consultants out there as well to dig in deep when necessary for quick jobs. I don’t know what utopia of FOSS software you are coming from but apparently every forum post is answered right away and there are zero unresolved bugs. Send me some links!
Trust me I understand your frustration because it’s not easy. I don’t intend to ignite this thread any more than it is, but there are people out there to help. I’d be happy to connect as well to see if/how we can help each other. Cheers!
Bill
Dear Friends,
I greatly acknowledge the contribution from the community to build Open source software. However, I would like to know, how come the AGPL software does not attract the bug fixes provided. Also, for any open source adoption to business, it requires business to be stable. Coming to consultants — when one cannot trust the stability of platform, how can one trust the consultants that they would solve the problem. Now a days, all open source products, barring a few are adopting the trend of being commercial, businesses cannot find value in open source software where the TCO is not guaranteed. Kaltura has got good number of features (I may say, teasing the customers to go for SaaS edition), not good enough to adopt in real life business. To give examples, Tight coupling of Sphinx with Kaltura, lack of option of clustering Sphinx (Sphinx is point of failure) – Kaltura consultant does not know how to do this?
Failing uploads (web uploads) – once you click ‘Upload control’ – losing upload token
Lack of availability of source code – login.swf
Lack of availability fo source code – v4.2.14.9 version of KMC
Distributing the batch schedulers (encode jobs) yield in inefficient transcoding – Please let me know, where can I find pointers to schedule jobs in this fashion – dynamically schedule jobs to different scheduler ids?
Try ingesting 8GB file in dropfolder – database column (file_size int (11) had to be modified, however, does not show proper value, goes negative); Do you have same software running SaaS? Justify the community please …
Another one … Remote storage profile – column size does not take password (AWS Secret)
I feel the forum is more to get free testing done in the name of being free and open source.
I have more issues, will come back after my friends from Kaltura answer this. I promise to put their suggestions/even my fixes back to community.
I would be grateful if any of community managers here to me to the right URLs.
Simply talking about great features, how much hard work went in this wont help unless the users are guaranteed of its stability. Otherwise it becomes a gimmick to upsell the SaaS edition.
Raghavendra – Installing Kaltura isn’t simple, yes, its install script demands work.
If you visited the GitHub repo or the forums in the past couple months – you surely have noticed there is great work in progress on that area.
I value your feedback, the technical remarks you raised on the past comment convey an interesting list of potential bugs that should be looked at – Have you submitted any of these as issues on the formal issue tracker? Have you asked someone on the IRC? Have you posted a thread on the forums? Sent someone an email?…
You are not entitled to tarnish the work and contribution of great many people before taking even the smallest step to participate.
Open source is a two way street, not a free lunch.
Hi Tim,
I’m doing kaltura consultancy (professorially for payment) , and I i have more then few active,happy customers using the Kaltura CE (version 4-6)
I understand your frustration of investing time and bot being able to fulfill your target, but as Daniel & Bill mentioned this is not a perfect world and issues are expected. And for some of the issues (like the SEO links) I really don’t get the complaint. you want to get it for free, and don’t expect the product to try & make anything of it?
Kaltura isn’t a simple product and the more complex it becomes the more expertise you need in order to properly install & configure.