CODEWITHSUNDEEP
flashvideopowerpoint
Ujaan
Ujaan

Reputation: 11

How does Udemy mash-up a PowerPoint presentation with a video for a synchronized play?

If you have used Udemy (I have used Zenation earlier, which is not as good as the app developed by Udemy.) to create a mash-up of a .ppt file with a video, you would know how wonderful it is. I would like to get an overview how they have built this application.

My guess is that first the application converts the .ppt slides into JPEG images which are then imported to flash so that the user can easily time-stamp the images while the video plays. Pretty much like sub-titles work. But, I am not sure about my guess. Does anyone have a better idea or give a few pointers to build this kind of application?

My professor wants to have an answer from me by Monday. Could you guys give an answer soon, so that I can work on my assignment this weekend?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1852

Answers (1)

Eren Bali
Eren Bali

Reputation: 21

I am the co-founder of Udemy and I built that tool along with some of our developers. Just for reference, we are talking about this: http://www.udemy.com/social-marketing-for-startups/

We convert the ppt, pptx or pdf files into a SWF file using a .Net application and Microsoft's own Office SDK. I know that using .Net is not cool but that's the only way you have a pixel-perfect conversion. We use a vector based flash format instead of images so that the thumbnails scale perfectly in animations.

Video part is straightforward, we encode them as 720p H264 videos.

If you have existing videos in Youtube or slides on Slideshare, you can use them directly. We are abstracting the video and presentations in our application to let users work with Youtube and Slideshare content directly.

Finally we have editors to create these mashups and players to show the video and presentation side by side.

They are all available on http://www.udemy.com for free for our instructors. You can signup, create a course and use the Create a Lecture > Create a Video/Presentation Mashup feature to create one. Once the mashup is created, you can also embed in your website.

[Promotion]

I would also strongly advise your professor to consider creating his course on Udemy. We are providing a lot more than the video/presentation mashups ;)

[/Promotion]

Upvotes: 2

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