After our GNOME 1,2,3 talk some people asked Xan and me about how we made the presentation. So here are the technical details:
- We made the slides using OpenOffice Impress
- We converted slides to pdf and showed them on screen using Evince presentation mode
- We got most of the videos from YouTube. (that’s a big improvemnt since our Birmingham talk, that we use full copies of movies)
- We use PiTiVi 0.13.1 version that was nicely updated on Fedora 11 some weeks ago. Many thanks to PiTiVi developers again, it was very easy and quick to use (in our previous talk we use mplayer -ss XX:XX -endpos YY to cut clips from the movies so, again, it’s a big step forward)
- For remote controling the presentation we used Valerio Valerio’s bluemaemo installed on my Nokia N800. I had to install maemo Chinook SDK and recompile it because there were only binary packages for Diablo and my N800 was not flashed with the firmware. I had to manually connect N800 to my laptop using hidd –connect because gnome-bluetooth applet was not able to connect to is as a input device. Bastien, I promise to look at it soon. This was a step-back from our Birmingham talk, because I didn’t find my CordLess Presenter, which have nicer buttons than the N800 touchscreen
- To start playing videos I bind a key on the laptop to a custom shell script. The script just read from an index all the videos, and play the first one not yet played. For playing videos I considered first using totem, but startup time was not fast enough for a smooth experience. I tried then mplayer, however after the first 0.2 secs of video it stoped another 0.3 secs, so it wasn’t an smooth experience either. After some basic debuging I realized that the problem was with the sound. Killing pulseaudio, a moving to real Alsa audio fixed this problem (I don’t really know if it is pulseaudio or mplayer fault).
Some people also asked me about the song we used to test audio and video in the room. It was Amelie-les-crayons singing Elizabeth: (click on the image to watch the video) 