telepresence content server recordings - legal compliance

[jorge.agra]

Hi,

we are considering the use of Cisco Telepresence TCS + TMS but have a mandatory requirement for safety marks / hashes / (whatever) in recordings so they can have legal force.

In the docs I didnt found any info about this subject. Can someone help me on this subject?

Best regards and thanks in advance for any help.

Jorge Agra

[Patrick Sparkman]

If you're talking about watermarks within the video itself, the TCS itself doesn't support this, it only supports a copyright field that gets inserted into the video file's properties.

If you'd like to have watermarks, you could introduce a device that can add them to the video between the endpoint camera and codec, so the video that gets recorded will include that watermark.  There is also the MXE 3500, that can add watermarks and in-video content, however you won't be able to playback a recorded video in the TCS web portal after it goes through the MXE.

[jorge.agra]

Thanks for replying Patrick.

Not talking about watermarks. We need some kind of hash or digital signature associated with the recording, that can be verified in the future, and be used as evidence that the recording hasnt been tampered.

[Patrick Sparkman]

Ah, I understand now.  There is nothing that I know of.

The recordings can either be stored locally on the TCS, however there is only about 300-450GB on the TCS for recorded media, or stored externally on a NAS.  If you're worried about tampering of the files, you could restrict access to only the necessary personal you choose which ever location you decide to store it.

Beyond making sure the files are as secure as possible, there isn't really anything else that can be done.

I should add the raw video files that the TCS uses to generate videos for playback is a .ogg proprietary file type that can't be opened with external programs that I'm aware of, or found.

[Wayne DeNardi]

The true, unaltered recording is the encrypted OGG file that is stored on the TelePresence Content Server and indexed in its database - this cannot be accessed by anything other than the TCS it was created with.

Any exported (or managed output) in a WMV/Quicktime/etc file is a transcoded copy of the original.

You could create your own MD5 hash of your file from TCS if you wanted to have some sort of thing that could be verified in the future to ensure that the recording had not been tampered with.  The TCS doesn't generate this, it is something you'd need to do yourself for any recordings you've exported and provided to another party.  You can use something like WinMD5 to do that.  You could then paste the MD5 value and details of who you provided it to in to the TCS "Edit Recording" page for that particular recording to keep a track of the value for the export and who you gave it to.

Wayne
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