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# grabslides
#
# grabslides : grabber for Axis 2400/2401 video servers and Video4Linux devices #
# (c) 2005, 2006 Jerome Alet <alet@unice.fr> # (c) 2005, 2006 Faculté de Médecine, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. #
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software # Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. #

grabslides is a command line tool we created to automate the synchronisation of videos and slides during live and on-demande courses.

It can capture frames from either a Video4Linux device, or from an Axis Video Server, and offers unprecedented flexibility to configure this capturing : device, channel, interframe delay, resolution, compression factor, output directory, link to the current slide, and so on are all configurable items. Some of them can be modified while the program is running through the use of signals, and in the future through a GUI. In addition, it can generate PDF, HTML and XML documents which will contain all the captured slides. There again, multiple possibilities are offered.

We use this software every day to capture slides from the output of a VGA-to-Composite converter. Once the capture is done, a SMIL generator is run over the set of slides produced, and a SMIL file linking to the video and slides, both synchronised, is created. The SMIL generator we wrote will be published later.

Installation :

0 - Download grabslides from :

http://cortex.unice.fr/~jerome/grabslides/

and extract it :

$ tar -zxf grabslides-x.yy.tar.gz

where x.yy is grabslides's version number.

1 - Install grabslides :

e.g. :

          $ cd grabslides-x.yy
          $ python setup.py install
        
      This will usually install grabslides into /usr/bin, although the
      exact location may vary depending on your system.

2 - Use grabslides :

$ grabslides --help

      grabslides will display its lengthy help, and you'll see the possibilities
      which are offered.

3 - That's all !

Troubleshooting :

To make grabslides work with all features, you need to install the following packages :

The Python Imaging Library (PIL) : http://www.pythonware.com
The ReportLab ToolKit : http://www.reportlab.org
The PyV4L module : http://members.optushome.com.au/pythondeveloper/programming/python/pyv4l/download/
The Psyco Python accelerator : http://psyco.sf.net

NB : grabslides can work in degraded mode if some of these modules

are missing, but you're on your own.

Please e-mail bugs to : alet@unice.fr (Jerome Alet)