Kaltura Capture - Troubleshooting strategies [UW-Madison]

This document provides some basic information on how to troubleshoot Kaltura Capture issues.

Kaltura Capture is good tool for shorter recordings (generally under 10 minutes). For longer recordings, Instructors and staff can download and use TechSmith Camtasia as an alternative - it is more capable and lets users do editing to update their screen or webcam captures.

This document provides some troubleshooting strategies for addressing issues with Kaltura Capture.

Review Device/Network Performance

Check Minimum specifications

First - make sure your computer meets the minimum requirements to run Kaltura Capture. The minimum requirements are listed in Kaltura Capture - Installation [UW-Madison] and Kaltura Capture - Prerequisites and System Requirements.

Try recording one device at a time

If you're having trouble recording try recording only either your screen or your webcam. If one works but not the other, that can help narrow down what device you need to troubleshoot.

Free some hard drive space

The amount of free space you need on your hard drive depends on several factors, including:

Whether you're only capturing your webcam, your screen, or both
The resolution you're capturing
The amount of motion/change in the video
The duration of your capture.

Generally we recommend that you should have at least 1 GB of free space available. A 1080p webcam recording records approximately 10 MB/min, and a 1080p screen recording records approximately 10 MB/min.

Memory under 1 GB error message

Generally the warning message will appear if you are running too many applications. Try to close any unneeded applications before creating a screencast with Kaltura Capture. We have had reports of the error message when users have more than 1 GB of memory free.

Test your home internet connection

While you don't need a fast internet connection to download Kaltura Capture or create screen recordings, having a good internet connection is important when you're ready to upload them to Kaltura MediaSpace. Captures that include both the screen and webcam are twice as large and will take twice as long to upload and process. Test your speed by going to fast.com. The test will initially run and show you your downloads speed. Click the "Show more info" button to see your upload speed.

1 Mbps upload speed should be able to upload a 250 MB file in about 33 minutes. File size depends on whether you capture both the screen and webcam, and what quality you are capturing at. A test 5 minute capture which included both the camera and screen set to 1080p quality was 233 MB.

Run Updates

Update Kaltura Capture

Usually, Kaltura Capture will automatically update itself if the application is left idle for approximately five minutes.You can try to update Capture if you are noticing issues. Alternately, you can try uninstalling and reinstalling Capture

While it updates, Capture will show a message to tell you that an update is taking place, and to avoid starting a new capture until the update is complete. A final notification will tell you when the update is finished. Kaltura Capture installations installed to lab deployments do not auto-update.

Check Device Settings

Try changing the capture resolution

Try changing the resolution in Kaltura Capture Manage → Settings to record a lower quality / resolution:
A screenshot showing the Kaltura Capture settings and a detail for the options to set the "Camera recording quality" and "Screen recording quality".

Kaltura Capture and macOS Retina displays

If you use a Mac with a high resolution Retina display, you may have quality issues. Some strategies for dealing with this are outlined in Kaltura - Known Issue - Kaltura Capture and macOS Resolution and Quality Issues [UW-Madison] .

Locating your local Kaltura Capture file recordings

See Kaltura Capture - Locating the Local Recording Files on Your Computer [UW-Madison].

We don't recommend moving local files, because it will break Kaltura Capture's connection to the, and you won't be able to upload or play them in Kaltura Capture.

If you need to move a recording to another folder,

Create a copy of the file,
Manually upload to Kaltura MediaSpace or other video streaming services
Add it to the desired folder.

macOS Kaltura Capture doesn't capture system audio

This is mentioned in Kaltura Capture - Installation [UW-Madison] , but Kaltura Capture on macOS is not able to capture system audio. For example - it cannot capture the audio from a video you play back while you are capturing. If you need to capture system audio we recommend using a tool like TechSmith Camtasia.