Eric Burns's dashboard

Eric Burns replied on May 29, 2009 17:02 to the question "Live broadcast is crashing" in Panopto:

Hi Andrew,

We'll fix the bug that fails to detect this dependency in the next version of the recorder. Sorry you ran into trouble!

Eric

Eric Burns replied on May 28, 2009 22:06 to the question "Where, oh where, has my video gone? DVD segment shown on Windows Media Player not captured." in Panopto:

Hi Sasha,

The "wind down during capture" approach sounds interesting. I'll investigate our options here, and if it looks like a possibility then we will include it in a future release. Thanks for researching this!

(By the way, I believe this is no longer a problem on Windows Vista and 7, at least when Aero is enabled.)

Eric

Eric Burns replied on May 28, 2009 22:01 to the question "Work around for non-intel based mac users" in Panopto:

Mi Marquis,

Microsoft made the decision to drop PPC support from Silverlight 2 and subsequent releases based on the PPC's current installed base: less than 3% of in-service personal computers and dropping. This leaves us with three answers:

1) In CourseCast 2.2, due later this summer, vodcasts may optionally use an image of the slides / screen / chalkboard instead of video of the presenter. This leaves users with the presentation audio and an image of the presentation material.
2) In the slightly longer term, we are looking at ways for users who already have the MP4 encoder installed to "turn on" a Flash-based player option. This will give Flash users a similar experience to Silverlight users.
3) If this is truly a deal-breaker, we can discuss our options with Silverlight 1 as a fallback for PPC users.

My hunch is that #1 will address your needs, but please email support@panopto.com if that's not the case.

Eric

Eric Burns replied on May 22, 2009 19:24 to the question "Accesing Panopto lectures via satellite internet access" in Panopto:

It's also possible to tune bandwidth requirements for playback. It should be possible to deliver video + PPT with as little as 100 kbps, although video quality will suffer.

Eric Burns replied on May 20, 2009 22:55 to the question "Confusion between 'classes' and 'courses' definition" in Panopto:

One other note - if this is confusing for your users, it is still possible to switch back to the original terminology.

Eric Burns replied on April 30, 2009 20:34 to the question "what type of digitizing tablet/pad would play well with Coursecast 2.1?" in Panopto:

Hi Joanna,

How have you been capturing the output of the Digital Scribe? Screen capture? It looks very interesting.

Thanks,
Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 30, 2009 19:43 to the idea "Uploading Prerecorded Videos" in Panopto:

Hi Joanna,

Here's the simple manual hack:

* Create your own WMV file from the video you want. You can do this with a DVD ripper, Windows Media Encoder, Expression Encoder, or anything that can write WMV files. Ideally, you want to use the web.prx file in Program Files/Panopto Recorder as your encoding profile.

* Do a short video-only offline recording with the recorder.

* Replace the wmv file created in the recording folder (which is under C:\PanoptoRecorder by default) with your file, keeping the file name the same.

* Use the recorder to upload the offline session. Tada! You now have a CourseCast session that uses your video as the primary video.

* Extra credit: if you want to have the video appear in a secondary video tab instead, you can just start a secondary video stream of any kind (screen, camera, whatever) at the point in the recording you'd like your video to play, and replace that video stream (usually .SCREEN.wmv or .OBJECT.wmv) with your file before uploading. This is probably closest to what you want.

If you are on a Panopto support contract, feel free to email support@panopto.com and they can put you in touch with me. I'd be happy to discuss this in more detail.

Thanks!
Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 28, 2009 17:56 to the question "Populating Students in a Panopto Class in BB" in Panopto:

Hi Marquis,

We are currently working on an enhanced BB plug-in (as well as various other LMS plug-ins) that will allow administrators to populate CourseCast with folders/courses from Blackboard. We'll follow up with more information as we get closer to releasing this component, but in the meantime the answer is just to manually create courses. We recognize that this is a major scaling issue for many customers, so we're focused on getting a workable solution out quickly.

Thanks!
Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 27, 2009 22:17 to the question "what type of digitizing tablet/pad would play well with Coursecast 2.1?" in Panopto:

We haven't tested with the Atom, but I would be surprised if the Panopto recorder doesn't work with it. It's not a very high-horsepower CPU, though, but I'd bet that it can handle video and default screencap settings at 1024x768.

Eric Burns replied on April 27, 2009 18:16 to the question "Hyperlinks in Panopto" in Panopto:

FYI, notes streams may contain clickable URLs. If you'd like to allow students to link out to external materials, publishing URLs along with other lecture notes (or a set of URLs inside a PDF, which you may attach to a presentation in CourseCast 2.1) is a good way to do it. We are hoping to make this even easier in the future.

Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 27, 2009 15:36 to the question "what type of digitizing tablet/pad would play well with Coursecast 2.1?" in Panopto:

Bill,

I have seen various groups have a lot of success with ordinary Windows Tablet PCs. Lecturers tend to use these as their presentation computers, then ink on top of their PowerPoint slides during the presentation or just open a scratch space and draw figures there. I'm less familiar with drawing tablets, however.

Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 22, 2009 18:36 to the idea "Uploading Prerecorded Videos" in Panopto:

Thanks for the suggestion. Can you clarify a little bit? Are you looking to create a new session from pre-recorded material (i.e. give the prerecorded material its own viewer and URL), or to add a video to an existing session and have it show up in the viewer? There are various options for this already, but all of them still require some manual fiddling. If you'd like to set up a call to go into detail, please email support@panopto.com and we'll schedule.

Thanks!
Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 10, 2009 16:12 to the question "Additional sort options for the recording lists?" in Panopto:

Hi Pete,

We are hoping to do a major overhaul of our folder/session list presentation in 2.2, and one of the most frequently requested features is more sorting options. If you'd like to talk more about what we can do until then, please feel free to give me a ring.

Thanks,
Eric

Eric Burns replied on April 02, 2009 17:58 to the question "Where, oh where, has my video gone? DVD segment shown on Windows Media Player not captured." in Panopto:

Bill,

From your description, it sounds like the screen capture continued but the video and audio weren't captured. There are two things that need to happen for this to work correctly: Windows Media player needs to be configured not to use what is called "hardware overlay" for rendering video, and the audio needs to be looped back into whatever device is capturing audio. Hardware overlay (under tools -> options -> performance in the WMP menus) is a rendering technique that bypasses the Windows display system entirely and draws video frames directly to the video output. Since this is all done in video hardware after Windows has rendered the screen, it's impossible to capture it. Turning off overlay will capture the video correctly.

The audio coming out of the DVD needs to be mixed in with whatever audio is being recorded by the presenter. If that's happening on another computer or camera, you'll need to find a way to mix the room audio with the presenter's mic.

Hope this helps,
Eric

Eric Burns replied on March 27, 2009 19:17 to the question "Ideas / Suggestions for Panopto use by visually impaired faculty. And students." in Panopto:

Hi Marquis,

I would love to speak with you on the phone about this to get a better idea of your recording set-up and requirements. Would you mind contacting support@panopto.com to set up a brief phone call?

Thanks,
Eric Burns

Eric Burns replied on March 25, 2009 18:01 to the question "Fastest way to delete full Courses?" in Panopto:

Hi Pete,

Full course deletion is coming in the public release of 2.1. You'll be able to obliterate lots of content with a single click, if you're so inclined.

Eric

Eric Burns replied on March 24, 2009 20:50 to the idea "reverse analytics" in Panopto:

That's a cool idea. I think we're a little ways away from true quotas, but I've filed a feature request and we'll see if we can work it into an upcoming release. Thanks!

Eric Burns replied on March 23, 2009 19:23 to the idea "No Twitter, of Facebook page?" in Panopto:

Not a bad idea. Do you think there's an appetite for tracking Panopto news/updates/bug reports/etc via Twitter?

Eric Burns replied on March 23, 2009 19:18 to the idea "reverse analytics" in Panopto:

Hi Brian,

Echoing Dave, we now have a bug on this. If anyone else is reading, we're all ears for general suggestions/wishes/dreams on where Analytics can improve.

Thanks!
Eric

Eric Burns replied on March 23, 2009 19:08 to the idea "Archiving, Identification" in Panopto:

Hi Brian,

Our goal with this is to produce a simple, client-side archive management utility. The filesystem layout should probably stay as it is, since it gives us a consistent and dependable way to scan and manipulate large amounts of archived content. Rather than overload the filesystem naming scheme for two purposes (structured storage of the content AND human-readable maintenance), we're hoping to leave it doing the thing it currently does well and produce a better tool for managing the archives. If this is a huge and immediate drawback, let me know and we'll figure out a stopgap for you.

We're going to try to throw something together in the near term, probably as an out-of-band utility that isn't tied to a release (as we did with the exporter). I'm going to guess you're interested in beta testing.

If you'd like to discuss futher, please email me directly and we can talk about features and timelines.

Thanks!
Eric