dotAstroPlayer

An interface to .Astronomy conference talks - displays slides, audio, video clips (if needed) as well as synced tweets and notes. The basic philosophy is to keep the bandwidth requirements low to make it usable on things like 3G connections. It uses progressive enhancement so people without Javascript see thumbnails of all the slides, all the timestamped tweets and messages, and can download the audio.

Examples

Some examples of the player being used for .Astronomy 4 talks:

1. Astronomy for a Better World (Kevin Govender)
2. How to be a Data Visualization Star (Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky)
3. Mechanical Turk and Glue (Michelle Borkin)
4. Seamless Astronomy (Alyssa Goodman)
5. Astro Crowdsourcing (Thomas Kitching)
6. Astronomy Dataverse (August Muench)
7. Javascript for Astronomy (Amit Kapadia)
8. AstroBetter (Kelle Cruz)

Recipe

Before you start make sure you have a dotastro.config file that contains the locations of VLC, ffmpeg and convert:

VLC	/path/to/VLC
ffmpeg	/path/to/ffmpeg
convert	convert

To make a talk ready for the web:

1. Save the talk PDF and video to the mytalk/source/ directory.

2. Extract the slides from the PDF. This step saves intermediate files in the format slide-NN.png within the source directory. If you have something other than a PDF you'll have to find your own way to extract the slides.

    perl webify.pl -extractslides=mytalk/source/mytalk_slides.pdf
   

3. Extract the audio from the video. This step saves this intermediate file to the source directory as extracted.wav.

    perl webify.pl -extractaudio=mytalk/source/mytalk.mov
   

4. If there is a demo in the talk that needs video, you can extract that part from the main video. This extracted part is saved to the source directory as extracted.mp4. If you need to extract multiple parts you'll want to rename them between each extraction.

    perl webify.pl -extractvideo=mytalk/source/mytalk.mov -start=19:53 -end=36:48
   

5. You will now need to create a setup.txt file which will be used to generate the final talk. If you haven't already got this you can generate one to work from:

    perl webify.pl mytalk/ -source=mytalk/source/ -setup
   

6. Edit the mytalk/setup.txt file so that the meta data is correct and the times for the slides are correct. This is the step that requires the majority of the human input as you'll need to work out the timings.

7. Now you need to create all the slides, audio and video files that will be used by the webpage. These get saved in the mytalk/ directory.

    perl webify.pl mytalk/ -source=mytalk/source/ -makeslides -makeaudio -makevideo
   

8. If you need to re-generate the HTML without needing to re-make the slides/audio/video just run:

    perl webify.pl mytalk/ -source=mytalk/source/
   

The result should be that the output directory mytalk/ now contains all the slides (3 sizes of each), audio (MP3 and OGG), video extracts (MP4, WebM) and an index.html file (as well as the original setup.txt file).