Adding more Xgrid agents to your cluster might not be always as straightforward as it seems. It might not even improve the performance, or worse, decrease performance. Here are some considerations and instructions on when and how to scale your Xgrid cluster.

If you've ever tried to setup Podcast Producer or Podcast Producer 2 and found yourself dropping f bombs left and right, you're not alone. Although PcP2's documentation clearly states that it works with Active Directory, there is no clear way on how to get the two working together. We have this working at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/

We have been covering more advanced topics up until now, but there have been a few requests for a basic description on how to setup a Podcast Producer server. For the purpose of this article I a.m assuming that you don't have any experience with Podcast Producer, but that you do have a basic understanding of Mac OS X Server and network administration.

We have deployed a custom video and audio recording and distribution system based on Podcast Producer 2 in the graduate division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Unlike many other organizations using Podcast Producer, we do not automate the recording of classes. Our system is primarily used to make ad hoc recordings of lectures and presentations and as a way to disseminate video material from faculty research projects. Additional goals of our system are to responsibly collect archival metadata and media for each recording and to ease the distribution of HTML5 compatible video and audio via our primary CMS (Drupal & WordPress), static websites, mobile devices and custom RSS.

Since we wanted to leverage Podcast Producer as much as possible to meet these goals we tried to keep our changes to the standard workflow to a minimum. Media is still forwarded to the system as before using (preferably) the bundled screen-capture feature in QuickTime X on the Mac or the Podcast Capture web interface for Windows. Following the upload we require our users to fill out a web form to collect additional metadata about their movie. Once this is done we provide a page with links to their MPEG-4 and Ogg encoded media in multiple sizes, custom embed codes which can be dropped into WordPress, Drupal and static websites, links to dynamically generated pages hosting their media, a custom RSS feed and an opportunity to revise their current metadata, if needed. Please see this page for sample video and audio. The sections below provide more detail on each of these features.