Parleys.com

Today we’ve updated both the player and desktop with some new features:

Mobile Markets

When you visit a Parleys channel you’ll now notice (if available) mobile market links, these will take you directly to the related tablet apps.

For example if you visit the JavaOne 2011 channel (click image below) you’ll see that both the Google Play & Apple App Store links are available!

Improved Layout

The video/slides layout has also been improved and optimized to enhance your viewing experience.
The navigation buttons are hidden after 8 seconds, this way you can focus on the actual presentation.

Firewall Detection

The updated player now detects if you’re behind a firewall, switching automatically the streaming protocol.

Enjoy!

In this tutorial you can see how we post-process (Level-1) Devoxx France talks.

Important notes:

1) both the MP4 video of the computer screen and speaker video include audio of the speaker.

2) And to make the post-processing easier both video’s should start at the same time.

At Parleys.com we strongly encourage you to use “MPEG Streamclip“, an awesome FREE encoding application (available for both Mac and Windows) which supports MPEG-4 and H.265 compression and much, much more!

What’s also a nice feature is that you can define the encoded file size, you should set this to maximum 300Mb for a one hour presentation.  This limitation is also enforced by the Publisher.

For Devoxx 2010 we used 800×600 resolution for the speaker video and 1024×768 for the computer signal (= demo’s), but variations are of course possible.  For example for the VMware talks we used a 1024×576 resolution of the speaker video because we didn’t have any demo’s.

Devoxx 2011 uses 16:9 speaker video, the frame size encoding is set to 1024×576 (unscaled).

For the audio encoding we suggest you use MPEG-4 AAC, Stereo 44.1Khz and 64Kbps.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Make sure “Interlaced Scaling” is unchecked!

During one of the Belgian Java User Group (BeJUG) sessions the speaker used QuickTime Player to record his own presentation.   Yes, the more recent MacBook Pro’s are powerful enough to record your screen, audio (using built-in microphone) and meanwhile do your presentation and demo’s!

The BeJUG hibernate 3.6 presentation by Emmanuel Bernard was a 2 hour presentation with two demo’s, the end result can be viewed HERE.

The recording used the default screen resolution from the portable which was 1900 x 1200 resulting in a 500Mb QuickTime MOV file.  After the presentation the movie was saved using the 1080p option.

The tutorial below shows you how to post-process this self made movie using the latest version of the Parleys.com Publisher.

Important Publisher features demonstrated in this tutorial:

1) Use the freely available QuickTime Player to record the screen and audio from the presentors portable

2) Extracting the sound (mp3) from the QuickTime movie using the Parleys.com Publisher (right-click option)

3) Re-encode the QuickTime MOV file to MP4 and change the resolution from 1900×1200 to 1024×768 (right-click option)

4) Create a two part presentation using the magical “Create two parts” feature (right-click option)

This tutorial shows you how to post process an audio only talk (= only mp3 and PDF slides) using our latest Publisher v4 (Beta-2).

Make sure you watch this tutorial in full screen mode!

We’re very excited to announce the immediate availability of three new Open Source Parleys.com Client projects for the iPhone, Android and iPad, hosted on Google Code!  (this is not an April fools joke)

This has been made available through the great initiatives of following developers : Vincent Claeys (iPhone), David Van Droogenbroeck (Android) and Jan-Kees van Andel (JSF2 and HTML5).

All 3 clients are using the current available REST-like interface, but we’ll upgrade this to a pure RESTful interface and kick start this project during our BeJUG dojo on April 22nd.  The result will be made available on Google Code, so even more people can get involved.

We welcome any help from the Parleys Community to move these open source Parleys client projects to even higher levels.   Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to develop a specific feature, improve the design, fix a bug, start another client project, etc.

Check out the code and get involved!

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

Enabling and publishing podcasts is very easy.  Go to the channel details page using the Parleys admin client and select the podcasts checkbox (see image below).  You need to have channel or space permissions to access this information.

Once the podcast checkbox is enabled you can press the “Podcast Sync” button  in the Publisher client sync page.

As simple as that, now get those podcasts out the door and spread the word!

Free podcast subscriptions are now available for Parleys.com channel(s).

A podcast icon (see example below) will be shown in the presentations overview page (both in the browser and desktop client). When clicked in the browser it will start your favorite mp3 player and download the first available podcast.  The desktop client will open the podcast feed in a browser.

Click the image above to open the Devoxx’08 podcast feed.

Not all channels are podcast enabled, this depends if the channel publisher has made the talk available as a podcast.

However expect all freely available Devoxx’09 presentations to be podcast enabled!

Happy Listening!

The latest version of the Parleys Publisher now supports extracting audio from your video through a popup menu enabled feature. (see picture below).

As a result you can use the video of the computer (with audio) for sync’ing your slides and when done extract and publish only the audio!

See this feature in action in the following tutorial:

More Parleys tutorials can be found on our dedicated Parleys Tutorial Space.

Based on our experience you’ve five options for recording your talks:

Level 5 – Audio only

This is the simplest way to record a talk, just place a digital audio recording device (for example your iPhone using the Voice Memos app) close to the speaker or have a wired or wireless microphone and record the signal. You can create an audio (mp3 or m4a) track in the Parleys Publisher and start post-processing very fast.

You can watch our Parleys.com Publisher tutorial on: How to post-process an audio only talk?

Audio Only Example

• Legacy to SOA by Dirk Slama

Level 4 – Speaker video

If you’ve a (digital) camera you can consider to record the speaker (including audio or even use your audio recording device as backup). Very important is that you place the camera in an angle where you can also see the projected slides, this way you know when the speaker goes to the next slide.

Speaker video example

• Introduction to JavaFX by Richard Bair

Level 3 – Local Screen Recording

If you control the computer of the speaker you can consider installing screen recording software.

If the speaker uses a Mac then you should consider using QuickTime.  This application allows you to record both the screen (including demo’s) and the audio.  You can watch our Parleys.com Publisher tutorial on how to: Mix video and audio in one talk. (see also related blog post).

Camtasia Studio and many others allows you to do screen recording but make sure you’ve a powerful enough machine and disk space to record a talk locally.

Local QuickTime screen recording example

• BeJUG Activiti talk by Joram Barrez

Level 2 – Remote Screen Recording

Remotely recording the speakers computer signal using a VGA signal grabber is less intrusive and gives you more control over the process. Is a great solution if speaker has many demo’s but more preparation work is required and can come with some extra stress during recording.

FYI – BeJUG recently bought an Epiphan Lecture recorder for our evening sessions and this works very well (I agree it’s not cheap).  It uses a solid state drive and an embedded frame grabber and audio-in recorder to do the job and it can also stream the presentation to the internet (we’ve not yet used the streaming feature).

Note: You can now also extract the audio from the slide video.  First sync your slides based on the screen recorded video and then extract the audio (Mp3) from the screen recorded video.  Now you can publish your talk as an audio-only presentation!  For this to work you need to include the audio in your original screen recorded video.

Level 1 – Remote Screen & Video Recording

In addition to Level 2 you can also consider to record the video of the speaker, this is what we do for Devoxx. We record the computer signal WITH audio but also record the video of the speaker WITH audio. The Parleys publisher supports multiple tracks, so you can add one video track with the slides and another track with the video of the speaker. The Publisher can auto-detect the slides based on the imported PDF and keep the high resolution demo parts when done.

Remote Video & Screen Examples

• All Devoxx’09 talks

So hopefully the above information can help you decide how to address your recording strategies!?
If you’re seeking assistance for your own conference then please consider Parleys.com as a potential partner, based on our in-the-trenches experience we can make a difference and make it happen!

Once you’ve recorded your talks you should have a look how to encode your media?