iRIS Connect - Teacher CPD lesson Ob software

[DrCheese]

When you say various issues, what have you been having?

 

I'm not a fan of the lamp post camera, it really ought to have it's own internal recording disk that worst case you can pull the recording off. As it stands if for whatever reason the upload box doesn't receive the stream, you lose the entire observation.

[this_is_gav]

Sorry for the late reply. We've just used it again for the first time for a few weeks, so I came to update the thread.

 

 

 

• Aspect ratios displaying completely wrong (so 16:9 videos filling entire screens, irrespective of what aspect ratio the screen is, or the Dual Discovery videos completely filling screens, even though the ratio of the video is what, 32:9 - see the hideously stretched 2nd screenshot above)
  
• The one video which is the correct aspect ratio in fullscreen mode places the video in the upper-left corner of the screen, showing the same size as before hitting the fullscreen button, so it doesn't even stretch beyond the half-way point on my 1920x1200 monitor
  
• An instance of only the video from 1 of the iPad uploading, but acting as though the videos from both were there, so it was hideously stretched
  
• The app on the primary, controlling iPad crashing mid-record, so videos didn't upload at all
  
• My favourite - as in the screenshot above, one of the 2 videos being encoded upside down (on the reflection created by their own training guy when he came in after we'd purchased the kit) - again, see screenshot above
  
• Just now I've had to take it out of a lesson because the remote wouldn't trigger a recording, then when we set it off manually on the iPad, the recording had no way of stopping other than force closing the app, losing that recording
  
• Some bog standard videos are not being supported in manual upload (uploaded a ripped Youtube video in MP4 and FLV format to test, but the FLV didn't work, though they do accept FLV videos (their test file is an FLV, and is actually the only video which has worked flawlessly). Not the biggest issue as you can just reencode the video into another container and try again. To be honest, this is looking like the only way in which we're going to be able to use the software, so might as well take it in house).
  

 

Our most successful day had 3 out of 4 recordings working fine (other than the fullscreen aspect ratio). The fourth the app crashed mid-record and we ended up with no recording from either iPad. That was our best day.

 

They've got an update coming out apparently this or next week, but my contact said it was only to address the upside-down video issue.

 

I wouldn't care too much about the aspect ratio, as you can view most of them fine it outside of fullscreen mode, but what worries me is that they're using a very common and popular Flash player (the premium version of JW Player), so these issues shouldn't exist. Once they've encoded the video, it should play fine on any screen, in any browser (which has Flash). That functionality is built into JW Player by default, so I suspect the issue isn't the playback of the videos, but their encoding of them.

 

It's taken them a month (and counting) to apparently fix the upside down issue, so how long is it going to take to fix these other issues?

Edited December 3, 2014 by this_is_gav

[Sylv3r]

What platform are you guys on? We are moving to v2 on Friday which I am told will hopefully resolve the issue with our iPOD touches crashing. I have been told by support that isn't a major issue in a lot of schools.... but some of the posts on here beg to differ.

[PotNoodleTech]

Having problems here too, videos taking ages to upload, the software crashing mid recording sometimes, the Swivl not following the teacher properly. On the old V1 here. Will contact support to request an upgrade to V2.

[this_is_gav]

What platform are you guys on? We are moving to v2 on Friday which I am told will hopefully resolve the issue with our iPOD touches crashing. I have been told by support that isn't a major issue in a lot of schools.... but some of the posts on here beg to differ.

We are on version 2. We only started in September and never saw version 1, so I was asking if V1 was more stable than V2.

 

I've just had a phone conversation with one of their tech support guys. Apparently there is a memory leak in the previous version (V2 B29) which they have/are working to fix, which should lead to more stability in the new version (V2 B30). Interestingly we've only had crashes with the primary iPad, but hopefully this helps.

 

We received the new update earlier, and it's a good one. It gives much more information, especially regarding issues in uploads and queues (Lightspeed filter here, which causes issues on iPads obviously), so in our case it stated that the 2nd recording we made yesterday was ahead of the 1st recording (somehow), but the 2nd wouldn't upload because the video from the primary iPad hadn't been uploaded (because we couldn't stop the recording, so had to crash out of the app, so the 2nd iPad was stuck in a confused loop). Deleting that 2nd video allowed the 1st to upload.

 

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope the new app solves the major issues we've been suffering from and will update this thread once we've used it a few more times.

 

Our remaining ongoing issue is that there appears to be a block somewhere down the line on the streaming server by our Northumberland council ISP, which is stopping us from viewing videos in school. All the addresses IRIS Connect give are open, but something is stopping us playing them. I've got IRIS contacting NCC to deal with the issue. I hate Lightspeed (or NCCs managing of it anyway).

 

 

Having problems here too, videos taking ages to upload, the software crashing mid recording sometimes, the Swivl not following the teacher properly. On the old V1 here. Will contact support to request an upgrade to V2.

Not having any speed issues with uploads. They tend to zoom along at a tidy speed (probably as fast as our wifi allows, which is slower than our internet upload speed!).

Edited December 4, 2014 by this_is_gav

[this_is_gav]

A further update on V2 of the software. We've had an about turn!

 

The iPad app is much, much improved and has been rock solid stable since build 30 was released (though some obviously had issues as we received build 31 yesterday). There have been issues with the swivel base and the remote - as well as the one above (remote not triggering a recording and ultimately us losing a lesson's work), yesterday it wouldn't stop a recording. Thankfully this time the 'stop' button was in place on the app so we were able to finish the recording on the screen and it uploaded and is presumably working fine on the website. Our contact at IRIS thinks it might be an intermittent Bluetooth fault, and if it happens again he's suggesting they will swap out our swivel base for a new one, though he didn't commit to that.

 

Our issue this week has been with the Lightspeed filter (run by the County Council) blocking "random" IP addresses which turned out to be used by Amazon AWS. It seems the video player itself is calling these servers, and it's not as simple as just adding an exception as these IP addresses are changed on a monthly basis, we're told. If we were to have a permanent fix for this, it would need County opening up the "unknown" category for our school, leaving us open to all sorts of potential incidents from little known sites across the globe, many of which by their very status are likely to be of a dubious nature, something we (and County) are unwilling to risk.

 

Thankfully today this cleared up, and videos are working fine, with my contact at the Council suggesting Lightspeed was learning these IPs and automatically assigning them to a category which is open for our school. If this does indeed happen on a monthly basis and we've got a day or 2 of being unable to access reflections, then I'm sure we can cope with that, being a small school.

 

What felt like a deal breaker yesterday has turned into a hope that we can continue using the service. Given the hectic schedule of the run-up to Christmas I doubt we'll be using them again before January, so hopefully new glitches aren't uncovered somewhere down the line when we do come to use them!

 

I count we're up to 78 email messages back and forth between myself, IRIS and County regarding the various issues encountered so far plus a good few phone calls. And however many our guy dealing with the contractual side of things has had (trying to get things going from a different angle).

Edited December 10, 2014 by this_is_gav

[timbo343]

We have received the NAS box (a gigabyte small PC which I think is running Ubuntu) and we have ticks on everything barring the following:

 

Uploadedbox updates – Unable to access http://iconnect-deploy:***@github.com/iconnect/uploadbox.git/: Couldn’t connect to server

System Software Updates – Error http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty-security/Release

System Software Updates – Error http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/disks/trusty/release

 

Everything is working after a few tweaks on the smoothwall but I cannot see any connections being made by the uploadbox to these sites so I dunno what to unblock, I have tried to unblock github.com and Ubuntu.com for the irisconnect user but again this doesnt work.

[howartp]

Temporarily put the IP address of the NAS box into the 801 exceptions and see if it works - you'll know it's definitely Smoothwall rather than say passwords etc then.

 

Peter

[timbo343]

Ah, forgot about that one. Ill give it a go.

 

Update.. made no difference.

Edited January 12, 2015 by timbo343

[Hybrid]

Ah, forgot about that one. Ill give it a go.

 

Update.. made no difference.

 

You could just add the upload box as an 'Allow All' on ports and as an 'No Auth Required' device. That will it will dial out to all addresses and ports without getting blocked upstream. This is how we have our upload box setup.

 

Hope this helps.