Some quick questions about Kaltura CE

Hi Guys, I will need a little bit of help form your side, I was trying to validate and test most of the functionality and features that we have in Kaltura, there is a lot of things available and testing/validating each one of them is a really hard work, so I will need your experience for some of my unresolved questions :blush:

  1. I’ve installed a new Kaltura CE on my server and It was working ok for uploading and seeing videos, but trying to validate and test the Mobile applications like KMC GO and Kaltura Media Space I ran into an issue, because I dont have kaltura running over https, I’ve tried to install it but Im still struggling with that part, so my question is: do you know if I can use a Kaltura CE instance for uploading videos with Kaltura MediaSpace application from my phone? Is there any limitation for Kaltura CE?

  2. Do I have any limitations on the number of users I can create for KMC? Also, my understanding is that I can use LDAP for Login right?
    Finally, can I configure the permissions for each user and limit access only to their videos?

  3. Does Kaltura CE support multi-tenancy? I mean, can I separate two different spaces (KMC, API, domain) using the same infrastructure?

I really hope you can help me here, on my side I will try to keep trying and setting up the server for validate my questions, but your input will be great too.

Thanks in advance.

Juan Pablo.

Hello @juanpanie,

RE #1 - I am a little confused here. Both KMS and KMS GO [which I assume is what you meant when you wrote KMC GO] are proprietary software and are not free nor open. They cannot be used with CE. Please see my explanation here: Feature Matrix?

RE #2 - you can set the number of KMC users per partner by going to Admin Console->Publishers->Your partner->Configure->Included Usage->Number of administrative (KMC) users. The default is 10.
At present time, KMC does not support LDAP as means of authentication. KMS does.
KMC and KMS are not the same thing: KMC [Kaltura Management Console] is FOSS [licensed as AGPLv3] and is shipped with CE, KMS [Kaltura MediaSpace], as previously mentioned, is proprietary software and is neither open nor free.
As for access control, you can leverage the content entitlement mechanism for that. As a starting point, please see:
https://vpaas.kaltura.com/documentation/Secure_Control_and_Govern/Content-Entitlements-Privacy-Enforcement.html
https://vpaas.kaltura.com/documentation/Secure_Control_and_Govern/Content-Categories-Management.html

As noted in these docs, this is also how KMS accomplishes the task.
We also support other access control mechanisms that allow black and white listing based on geo location, specific IPs and so on, if that’s of interest to you, please see:
https://vpaas.kaltura.com/documentation/Secure_Control_and_Govern/kaltura-media-access-control-model.html

RE #3 - multi-tenancy is a very broad term:) In general, the answer is yes, it does. One Kaltura Server can have multiple partners, each partner can have multiple users, with different privileges. Also, as explained in the docs discussing content entitlement, different users can have different privileges on different categories.
The Kaltura API is RESTful, stateless, API. In order to initiate a session [KS], one must provide the partner ID, secret [or the email ID for a given user and a passwd] and optionally a userId.
It is important to note that all web interfaces [Admin Console, KMC, KMS, etc] built on top of the Kaltura Server rely on the API to perform their operations and so, whatever can be done via any of these, can be done from external apps, using the same set of APIs.
For API documentation and code samples, see https://developer.kaltura.com.
A general intro into our API can be found here: https://blog.kaltura.com/api-inside-out-kaltura-architecture/

I hope this answers your questions, let me know should you need more info,

1 Like

Hi @jess, it seems you are everywhere :blush:

Thanks for your comments, it really helps to understand the Kaltura Ecosystem and architecture.

Just one more question, I saw the link you passed with documentation regarding the API for the access control model, I start navigating the same page and I found some other topics related with recording from a webcam here: https://developer.kaltura.com/workflows/Live_Stream_and_Broadcast/, is that something we can perform from Kaltura CE, is all the API documentation shared between CA and the Kaltura SaaS?

Thanks

Juan Pablo.

Hello @juanpanie,

https://developer.kaltura.com/workflows/Live_Stream_and_Broadcast/ refers to using the Kaltura Live mechanism, used on our SaaS platform, which utilises Wowza. Wowza is neither open nor free so if you wish to use it, you’ll need to purchase a license from Wowza.
Our integration with Wowza is FOSS [https://github.com/kaltura/media-server/ licensed as AGPLv3] and you can, if you wish, deploy it on CE but no official support will be provided by us should you choose to do so.

As an alternative, CE is shipped with kaltura-nginx which is compiled with the Nginx RTMP module. This will allow basic live streaming operations using completely FOSS components. You can read more about that here: