narrate your powerpoint slides using profcast

I experimented with Profcast some years ago and really liked it’s easy to use interface. Just came across a YouTube video explaining how to narrate your powerpoint slides and then export it as  a QuickTime movie. Plus you can provide navigation easily. It’s still a nice product.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I6o2AZ7DN8

convert video podcasts to audio only

Some podcasts come in video format only (like Flash Game University), but my lovely old Nano is not video capable. Sooooo, I’m going to try this out very soon:

http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/03/10/how-to-convert-a-video-podcast-to-audio-only/

Update 11 august 2008:

Looks like the suggested software, MediaCoder, is mainly available for Windows. By “mainly” I mean that you can jump through a dozen hoops to get it working on OS X, but why bother? Instead I’m off to try this out with VMWare and Windows XP, see how it goes…

Media Coder

Yes! This works just as in the instructions from andrew, nice. Only one file refused to be converted, no idea why. But watching one video while sitting at the computer won’t kill me. And I have a bunch of audio that I can listen to on my ipod. Excellent.

extracting audio out of an mp4 movie

This is the next step from the previous exercise, where we converted a dvd into ipod movie format, chapters and all. Great for the other part of we that has a video ipod. Those of us with “only” a nano that doesn’t play video need an audio-only file. So the next step is to get the audio part out of that. (Handbrake unfortunately doesn’t offer an audio only option, at least not that I can tell.)

So we could go back to the dvd probably, but for now I wanted to try to get the audio out of our freshly baked mp4 file. It’s not too difficult after all, and many tools exist out there. A quick test with ffmpegX worked fine, pulling out the audio into several formats (mp4, aac, ac3), taking only minutes each time. (I fumbled with the different formats looking for one that included chapter marking.)

Problem is, those didn’t seem to bring in the chapter marking. Picky picky picky. But chapters would make listening to individual lessons on the dvd much, much easier: there are parts that really are not necessary to hear repeatedly, so skipping around to specific chapters would be nice.

So we got audio. One big hour and a half chunk of it. Next challenge will be to pull out just the audio but this time with chapters. It might be necessary to go back to the dvd for that one… stay tuned. So to speak.

audio player wordpress plugin

thanks to davidtouvet.com

a nice-looking wp plug-in to make it even easier to post audio files as enclosures, player included