Indexed Powerpoint

Synchronized PowerPoint plus video using RealVideo

Brian Smith's Lecture Browser

For sometime now, I've had this idea of creating a web page that had a table of contents that listed each slide where when the user clicked on the slide title, the video would jump to that location and the slide would come up.

The initial screen would look something like

- -----------------------------------------------------------------
|    Header							|
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
|		|			|			|
PPT slide titles|   Video		|  ppt slide itself	|
|		|			|			|
|		|			|			|
|		|			|			|
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
|   Footer							|
- -----------------------------------------------------------------

(don't ya just luv ascii art?)

The way to do this is to use asf markers.

The way to generate the asf markers is to write some JavaScript runs the asf file and prints the time of each slide flip.

This JavaScript is only used to get the times of the slide flip, we don't actually make this particular JavaScript file publically available or anything. The JavaScript on gigavault could be used as a starting point, we would just need to print out each url flip and the time as they occur.

Then we take the list of slide flips and their times, and put them into a file and then use the ASFcheck command line utility to add the markers. I'm not sure what the format is for ASFCheck, but one way might be to take a .asf file, add markers by hand using the GUI and then dump the markers to a text file and load it back in.

The biggest reason _not_ to do this is that maybe Office 2000 does the right thing and has this capability. Even if Office 2000 has templates that do this, we will probably want to customize them to follow the look and feel of the website.

The biggest reason _to_ do it is that it will give us better experience with the guts of ASF files.

I'm not sure if this is something that you are interested in doing yourself, but if we processed Richard's JavaTime talk and showed it to him on Monday, Jul 26, then that might lead to other areas of discussion.

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