Every person participating in live lectures needs to install the eLecture Console on his/her computer. This installation is straightforward; no configuration is required. In order to connect to the server, the student needs to know the IP address of the server and port number.

The eLecture Server installation and configuration is a more complex procedure, which the lecturer or administrators need to perform. First of all, any version of Microsoft SQL Server needs to be present on the server computer. Follow the instructions on our download page to install free SQL Server 2005 Express. Secondly, run the installation program for eLecture Server. If Unreal Media and Archival servers aren't present on your system then the installation will install these servers together with eLecture server. All these servers run as windows services, so you finally have 3 new services on your system: UMediaServer, UArchivalServer and eLecture Server.

After the installation of eLecture Server, run an Administration Console program, choose your language and add new lecture via the menu item. Each lecture is associated with a single lecturer; therefore you will need to add a first new lecturer to the system.

The key components of a lecture are live audio/video feeds. To add audio/video feeds, you will need first to install Unreal Live Server or have our UM100/UM200 hardware device. Ideally the Live Server should be installed not on the same computer where the eLecture Server runs, because Live Server consumes processor and memory resources very intensively for real time encoding of live audio/video. Once you configure a live source with Live Server Configuration program, you can import this configuration to eLecture to add a streaming feed associated with the lecture. Up to 3 feeds can be added to a single lecture. Alternatively, you can add live feed manually, specifying Live Server IP address and ID of live source configured on the Live Server.

When the lecture is configured, the lecturer can run eLecture Console program and login to the system with the credentials previously used to create a new lecturer with Administration Console program. Students can register their accounts using eLecture Console program; depending on the lecture settings they will or will not be able to freely subscribe and participate in live lectures. Attention! Only lectures that allow free self-subscribing will initially appear at the student's console in the list of available lectures. A lecture that does not allow self-subscribing, requires an administrator to subscribe students to it. Usually this process involves some payment for subscription; such lectures can be published on organization's website; once a student makes payment, an administrator will subscribe this student for that lecture. Then that lecture will appear in the list of available lectures for this student and he/she can participate in that lecture.      
 

   © 2003-2008 Unreal Streaming Technologies. All rights reserved.