[ale] Recording & Distributing ALE meetings (was Re: ALE CENTRAL MTG. for 7:30pm on Thursday, February 17, 2011 CE (reprise))

[Aaron Ruscetta]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Derek Carter <goozbach at friocorte.com> wrote:
> On 2/16/11 1:32 PM, arxaaron wrote:
>>
>> Goozbach (Derek) is presenting at CHUGALUG in Athens for
>> their (third Thursday) meeting this week and I just loaned him my
>> Zoom4 and some microphones for a presentation recording
>> experiment they are running, We didn't have much time to
>> discuss the details when I handed off the equipment, but it sounds
>> like an approach that would meet the criteria I just outlined above.
>> If the methods work, then this would make podcasting of our
>> meetings practical..
>
> Actually I'm not presenting, just doing the recording demo of the
> presentation.

Thanks for the correction.

> This is the software side of what we'll be trying is a project called
> Freeseer. https://github.com/fosslc/freeseer/wiki/

Looks interesting - perhaps a project I should get involved with.
About time I did some real FLOSS programming! :-P

This issue of presentation capture and distribution is definitely
needing an easy to implement low bandwidth solution.
(IMHO, full motion Pixieo is a bandwidth hog that doesn't add
enough to the communications to warrant the waste).

> We don't yet have a VGA capture device, so we'll be filming the
> slides using a firewire camera (I know kinda hackish).

Not surprising. On your suggestion that they existed I looked for
"frame grabber" devices that went directly from VGA -->> USB
for quite a while last night.  There are a couple out there, but the
least expensive (though overall best cross platform device) is $300:
<http://www.epiphan.com/products/frame-grabbers/vga2usb/>

The common solution seems to be to take the SVIDEO out
of the laptop (when available) or encode the VGA output
to video, then capture the standard NTSC or PAL video with
one of the cheap video frame grabber devices or other
encoding solution.

I've already got some gadgets that would facilitate this
cheaper path, like a high quality VGA -->> video converter
and a digital camera that will transcode analog A/V to
Firewire.   Again, if I find a little time, I may try to experiment
with these this Thursday.

> I will for sure be writing up our success (or lack thereof) of this
> experiment.

Will watch for it!  Thanks!

peace
aaron

> --
> Derek aka goozbach
>