In this section:

Ground the Capture Appliance

Follow these best practices:

• Be sure to use the 3-prong power cable provided to plug the capture appliance into a grounded (3-prong) socket. Using a 3-prong cable ensures that your appliance is properly grounded.
• If you must use a 2-prong socket, then you must also ground the appliance. Attach one end of a ground wire to any of the chassis screws on the back of the appliance. Attach the other end to a natural earth ground.

If you do not properly ground the capture appliance, you may introduce electrical issues.

Networking Requirements

Basic Networking

A fully qualified domain name or dedicated IP address for the EchoSystem Server (ESS) is required. An active Internet connection is required during the licensing step. The ESS should be accessible by all capture appliances and Classroom Capture software devices. External access to the ESS from Personal Capture devices may be restricted by requiring VPN, or be subject to firewall policies.

Student Access

The ESS application and content base URLs provide student access to presentations. If you need to provide student access outside of the campus LAN, these URLs must be accessible from the Internet.

Networking Support for Publishers

The EchoSystem provides two publishers (referred to as workflow publishers) for automated closed captioning and search indexing. These workflow publishers require the ESS application base URL access from the Internet. By default, this is configured using SSL on port 8443.

Firewall Requirements

See Firewall Requirements for Installation.

Presentation Authentication

ESS has the ability to integrate with an LDAP authentication server to secure presentation links. The LDAP authentication supports LDAP v3 and has been tested with Microsoft Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and OpenDirectory authentication servers.

To successfully configure LDAP authentication, you will need to obtain the following information from the administrator of your authentication server:

• LDAP URL: The link to the LDAP server that the ESS will use. (i.e., ldap://server.domain.com:389)
• Manager DN and password: The Distinguished Name (DN) and password of the user that can query the LDAP tree. (i.e., CN=Admin,CN=Users,DC=Domain,DC=edu)
• LDAP access hierarchy: Group Attribute Name and Value, Base Group DN. (i.e., OU=Law,OU=university,DC=SchoolDomain,DC=edu)

Playback Requirements

EchoSystem will be transparent to your students. Students will access presentations either via a publisher plugin (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle), RSS (podcast) feed, or even public-facing web page, depending on your publication configuration. EchoPlayer presentations, or Echoes, are played back from a standard web browser. Downloadable files such as podcast and vodcast formats are played back on supported media players.

For EchoPlayer presentation in the browser, the Adobe Flash Player plugin (9.0.0 or greater) must be installed.

Hardware Recommendations

PC/Mac:

• 2.4 GHz (minimum) Core i5 Processor
• 4GB RAM

Supported Browsers by Operating System

Our recommended browser is Chrome.  For additional browsers, please see Supported EchoPlayer (Student Player) Browsers.

Minimum Bandwidth Requirements

• "High Bandwidth" EchoPlayer with video streaming is approximately 300 kbps
• "High Bandwidth" EchoPlayer with audio streaming is approximately 112 kbps
• "Low Bandwidth" EchoPlayer is approximately 56 kbps

Podcast Playback Requirements

EchoSystem produces two different types of podcast formats for student review. Below are the playback requirements for each format:

• Podcast Audio (MP3) - typically downloaded by students through CMS/LMS/VLE via RSS feeds provided by ESS or iTunes U. Playable on any MP3 player.
• Vodcast (M4V) - typically downloaded by students through CMS/LMS/VLE or via RSS feeds provided by ESS or iTunes U. Playable on a computer using QuickTime and Windows Media Player. Portable playback on iPod or Zune.