@David: Absolutely, I’ve been keeping up with your blog posts on audio and processing and I’d really like to talk to you about it sometime–will ping you.

@gerv: Ugh, it did cut out all your example HTML, and I tried editing your comment and it looks like I can’t “restore” it in any way either. Stupid Wordpress… That said, though, I like the DSL you came up with for the subtitles, since subtitles are usually just text with simple bold/italic markup, but for slides it seems as though having the full expressiveness of HTML at your disposal would be useful…

@Tantek: Awesome, I’d love to see that happen. It shouldn’t be hard to develop a simple annotation tool/web-app that makes it easy for anyone to contribute a podcast-slideshow synchronization timeline, too.

@Zack: Yep, the privacy concern re: Herdict is definitely one of the “big problems” we need to solve. Hopefully we’ll get lots of discussion on that once we release the prototype. I also agree with your SSL errors problem, that would be another great problem to help solve, in particular because most users have no idea what to do when encountering an “untrusted certificate” screen.

I also agree that graceful degradation is a must-have. What really needs to be done is a custom UI for the slider so that we can have it hooked up to a “null implementation” that doesn’t play any audio, or even to a “composite implementation” that makes multiple audio files in sequence seem like a single cohesive audio element (this would make the parts comprising the audio as remixable as the video, and reduce the need for an audio editing program like Audacity).

It would be great to just provide the Vorbis audio and have it played by Java, Flash or Silverlight as a backup.

How hard would it be to get OpenOffice Impress outputing to this format? Doesn’t it already do flash?

Gerv

You’ve got several good ideas going here, and I’m going to explore the possibility of implementing at least a few of them in S5 http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ which is currently what I use for all my presentations.

If done right, someone could even take an original S5 presentation and podcast of a talk, and then annotate the S5 with time indices for the slides according to the usage in the podcast.

Tantek

Regarding herdict integration, I have a privacy concern. It appears to me from the herdict website that the hostname of the site you were trying to reach is sent to the herdict server in the clear. In some contexts, the mere fact that you wanted to reach a particular site is privacy-sensitive information (consider https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330884 for example) and of interest to eavesdroppers in the middle (China’s filtering system comes to mind). Can we do something about that?

I also have a scope-creep suggestion. I was just in a cafe with a compromised WiFi router that was tampering with my SSL traffic. This showed up in the Firefox UI as certificate errors on every HTTPS site I tried to visit. The certificate errors were more than usually confusing, but that’s not the point. The point is, if I get a certificate error on a website, it would be very useful if the browser could automatically check whether “everyone” gets the same certificate error, and whether I would have similar problems connecting to other SSL sites.

The really cool way to package this up would be a JS library. The first two inputs would be a Vorbis file, and a text script with embedded time markers and slide numbers, like the following. (I think it’s better to have the timing and slide info embedded in the script, rather than in the HTML markup.)

[0:00:00 1] Firefox’s network error pages are familiar to everyone.
[0:04:00 2] But they’re not very useful. Most people, if they’re like me, see this wall of text and interpret it to mean “the internet broke and we have no idea why.”
[0:14:00 3] …

This would be parsed to automatically generate the subtitles and put up the right slide (the second number is a slide number). Or it could be downloaded for reading by deaf people (or the impatient!).

The last input would be the slides. I’m not sure if it would be better to have them in one file or multiple files. Say one file; all you’d then have would be:

…

…

This way of doing things also allows you to reuse slides without repeating the markup. You could also have a print view which would print the slide numbers next to the slides, so it could be referenced by someone using the transcript.

Gerv

anon: I agree that there should be a fallback link, but if JS is disabled, AFAIK you can right-click the element and select “Save File” or something like that.

Gerv

- better accessibilty than regular video (text can be read by a screen reader),
- easier for search enignes to index,
- faster load time and playback (no video decoding) - watching this on the n900 is a real pleasure!

Thanks for putting this together and including a friendly license.

jd/adobe