SeeVogh Player manual

Transcription

1 SeeVogh Player manual Current Version as of: (03/28/2014) v.2.0 1

2 The SeeVogh Player is a simple application, which allows you to playback recordings made during a SeeVogh meeting with the recording function and it includes some postproduction conversion and editing functions. The player runs on three PC platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOS X) and supports three types of extensions: *.evo (standard SeeVogh or EVO recordings), *.evz (zipped SeeVogh or EVO recordings) and *.evx (SeeVogh or EVO recordings stored on a remote server). Figure 1: Main player window The main window is divided into two main parts: the top control bar section and the display section which shows each of the video tiles. The control bar contains the main player controls including play, pause and stop. It also includes a slider, which shows the current position in the recording and allows you to quickly move forward and backward in the recording. You can only move the slider when you are in the play or paused state. A download progress bar will appear below the slider when you play.evx files which streams from a remote server. To the right on the control bar is a folder icon and a speaker icon. The folder icon permits you to select the file you wish to play. The speaker icon has three functions. By clicking on the icon you can toggle the sound on and off. A blue ball with a white check mark appears superimposed on the speaker when the sound is turned on. Additionally the view meter on the left side of the icon displays the instantaneous output. The small down-arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the icon is a drop down menu where 2

3 you can select the output speakers for the audio track. The two numbers to the far right show the current position in time and the total length in time of the recording. The application menu is found by clicking on the SeeVogh eye and contains the follow selections. [File] Open - opens locally stored files (*.evo, *.evz, *.zip, *.evx). Open URL - opens remotely stored *.evx files, typically an http link. The recording is downloaded into the user s temp folder. Note that the recording file(s) will not be deleted after closing the player. Close - closes opened recording files. Properties - provides useful information about the current recording. [Tools] EVXCreator a simple tool that allows you to create.evx files from currently opened SeeVogh/EVO recording. A detailed description is found below. Edit a simple editing tool which allows you to remove some parts and/or streams from a recording. A detailed description is found below. Repair SeeVogh/EVO recordings this function helps you to recreate a new.evo file from recording where the original.evo file may have been corrupted or deleted. A detailed description is found below. Merge recordings a tool which merges two or more recordings into single recording. A detailed description is found below. Convert converts recordings from native SeeVogh/EVO format to industry standard formats like MP4, AVI, MOV, MP3, WAV and others. See a detailed description below. Note: This is a specialized function and some additional library installations may be required to use this capability. See the important notice in the converter section below for more details on this. [Preferences] Shows application preference such as language choices. [About] Shows information about the SeeVogh Player application. [Exit] Quits the application. The display section of the SeeVogh player behaves the same as the SeeVogh applications. Once the application is selected, video tiles can be manipulated, detached, dragged to other monitors and resized. There is an upper and low area to the display section of the player. To move a tile to the lower area simply click on the tile and you will see it automatically migrate to the bottom of the screen. Place enough tiles in the lower section and you will see the tiles pivot to make more room for additional slides. To move a slide back to the upper area simple click on it again and it will return to the upper area. 3

4 Video tiles in either region can be detached from the player window to become a freestanding tile outside of the SeeVogh player framework. To do this place your mouse of the video tile and locate the two overlapping white triangles, which appear in the upper right corner of the tile. Click on this icon and a copy of the tile will appear in the upper left-hand corner of your primary screen. This tile can be dragged to a new location by grabbing the title bar and dragging the window to the new location. Additionally, detached tiles can be resized by grabbing the handles in the lower right hand corner of the detached tile and dragging it down and to the right for larger or up and to the left to make it smaller. Double clicking on the window buttons will expand it to full screen. EVXCreator EVXCreator is a simple tool that creates a small.evx descriptor file from a SeeVogh/EVO recording for web publishing. This file describes the recording files list and their placement on a remote server. If you want to distribute a recording to many people, you don t need to send the whole recording to each person. You simply create an.evx file, upload the recording on server and publish the.evx file. The.evx file can be put on a web page or sent via . If an.evx file is published as a web link, you don t have to download it to computer. On the SeeVogh Player menu go to File/ Open URL and put the link to the.evx file there. Description of fields: Figure 2: EVXCreator window Name the name of the recording. The destination.evx file name is created using this name. If you have chosen a destination folder, the destination file name is automatically updated according to this name. 4

5 Source URL URL link to the recording on the server. This link must point to the location where the EVO recording will be stored. For example, if the recording contains files sample.evo, sample_0 and the source URL is their placement on the server should be as follows: and These files must be accessible to be played by the SeeVogh Player. Destination.evx file name of the file where generated content will be saved. You can choose the destination folder by pressing the button. The file name is created combining this folder name and text from the name field. The extension (.evx) is added automatically. After pressing the Create button, the.evx file is generated and you are informed about the state via the progress bar. Note: if you start EVXCreator and the SeeVogh Player is in a play state, it will be paused. This is done for performance reasons. Editing SeeVogh Player s built-in editor allows you to make simple editing operations like removing some portion or a stream(s) from the recording. Only.evo files can be edited and this process does not affect the original recording. First, you will need to specify the parts you want to keep. This can be done in two ways. You can enter times directly by double-clicking on time value and putting the exact time there. The second way is to set times directly from the player when playing or in a paused state by pressing the Set begin or Set end buttons. You can make fine adjustments to these settings by using the small up and down arrows that changes the values in 100 milliseconds increments. To check region margins, you can use three different play buttons. The first plays for four seconds after the beginning mark and then pauses the recording. Second plays for four seconds before the ending mark and third play button plays for 10 seconds after the beginning mark and before ending mark. There is also a text field for comments to help you organize your work. By pressing the + button to add the selected segment to the list. The - button removes the selected segment from the list. When you have all of the segments ready, press the Get streams button for a list of all the selected segments. When you are satisfied with your set up, press the Export button, input a name for the new recording and save it. It may take a while to save it, depending upon the amount of data that has to be processed. Repairing A Recording This tool helps you to recreate a.evo file for playback in the case where the original.evo file was accidentally deleted or corrupted. From within the application select the folder where the recorded files are stored and press the Repair button. The software then checks the recording for consistency and a new.evo file is created. If some of the recorded data files are found to be corrupt they will be excluded (but not deleted) from the recording. After the process is finished, a new.evo file and log file are created in the folder with the recorded files. 5

6 Merging Recordings This tool permits you to merge two or more SeeVogh recordings to a single recording. Place as many SeeVogh recordings as you want in the display list using the plus ( + ) button. If you need to remove a recording from the list, select it and press the minus ( - ) button and it will be removed from the list. Input the destination file name. Press the Merge button when you are ready to create the new file. All listed recordings will be merged into a single recording using the name you provided. Converter The SeeVogh Converter is a simple application which converts native SeeVogh/EVO recordings to standard formats like MP4, AVI, MKV, MOV, MP3 or WAV. It can convert *.evo, *.evz and *.zip recordings. Conversion of.evx files is not supported. Figure 3: Main converter window 6

7 IMPORTANT: Converting recordings is a CPU intensive operation, which works in real-time with multimedia data. Due to the nature of this operation, it is recommended that you do not perform any other activities on the computer while the converting is in progress. We recommend the use of at least a two core CPU with a 3GHz clock rate or better for good results and a more powerful machine for recordings containing many streams at high resolution and high output frame rates. Even if all these requirements are satisfied, you may experience small desynchronization between the audio and video tracks, particularly with longer recordings. In this case, it would be help to split the recording into shorter segments. The converter needs the FFMPEG binary to work properly. You can download the binary appropriate for your operating system at the following link: We do not recommend using binaries from other sources. You may experience poor results from such versions of FFMPEG, especially at higher resolutions. After downloading and extracting the binary from their zip distribution format, go to the Settings tab in the converter and set the full path name to your FFMPEG binary. After pointing the application to the location of your uncompressed FFMPEG file, using the converter is straightforward. Just select the input and output file, destination format and other parameters according to your needs. We recommend using HD (1280x720) resolution as the maximum setting. Of course, it is possible to convert to Full-HD resolution (1920x1080) but you will need a powerful machine to do this. Even so you may experience desynchronized video or some other anomalies in your video or audio output files. If your video contains video streams, which you would like to remove from the recording, you can edit them out during the conversion process through the controls found under the Streams tab. When you click on the Get streams button the entire recording is searched for all available streams. You can enable or disable individual streams with the check boxes next to the list of participant names. A check in the box means the stream will be available in the destination file. Audio and video streams are distinguished by an [A] and [V] respectively, next to the check box. The conversion process starts after clicking the Convert button and runs in real-time. This means converting a 10 minute long recording will take 10 minutes. The progress is shown in the bottom righthand section of the window. It shows the time remaining until the conversion is complete, as well as, the percent completed. At the end, FFMPEG needs approximately 5 to 60 seconds to finalize the output file. This process is very important and if not finished properly the output file may be unreadable. However, if you decide to cancel the conversion process, the most recently converted segment may be played and viewed. 7