Posted by Richard Crowley on 09/13/05 15:03

"Kaveh" wrote ...
> Imagine a one day conference with, say, ten speakers.
> One after another comes to the podium, and plugs in
> his/her laptop. I need a box that continues to record
> whatever is pushed through the video projector.

There is currently no way of doing that if we assume
that you want to preserve the full resolution of the
computer image in real time.

OTOH, if you want to just preserve PPT slides and the
presenter's speech, there are free utilities like Microsoft
Producer which installs on the presentation computer and
grabs each slide along with the speech recording and then
allows you to create a program that can be played back.
There is even a variation that allows you to plug in a video
camera and capture an image of the presenter (or whatever)
and show both the live video and the PPT slide on the screen
during playback. Producer is actually quite slick and we
use it all the time where I work (a large multi-national hi-
tech company).

> So
> with my (basic) understanding, I need a box that is permanently
> recording what is being projected. This might be a splitter device,
> pushing the output from the computer to both the 'box' and the
> projector.

Sure, you can get a distribution amplifier for the computer
video, no problem.

But a *recorder* for computer video has not been invented
yet. I would be surprised if it ever happens as cost would
far outweigh any percieved benefit of potential customers.
(Mainly the cost of storage of real-time, very high resolution
moving images).

There ARE software applications that do this, but they
require installation on the presentation computer to take
advantage of the way the video is generated to make the
"recordings" much more practical. But once the video
escapes from the computer, it is a difficult thing to record
in real-time at full resolution.

> I hope such a thing is possible.

Because of the high-resolution of computer video, and because
you can't predict the resolution of any of your presenters'
computers, I don' believe there is no practical way of doing this.

Without knowing the other constraints and requirements
of your situation it is impractical to try to offer alternate
suggestions, there are just too many of them.

We use MS Producer very effectively for situations that
sound similar to yours. You can't beat the price (free),
but you have to live within the constraints (which seem
quite reasonable to us.)

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