Simple PowerPoint + audio slideshow creator for linux
Via gnomefiles I found SuperShow, an awesome little application that lets you load a pdf and audio file and time the presentation. For example, you can take a PowerPoint, export it as a pdf, and load both it and an audio file in SuperShow. Once in SuperShow, you just click “next slide” as the audio plays, it remembers your timings, and when the audio file ends, it exports your show as a flash (.swf) file. It’s really simple to use and it’s actually one of the easier solutions I’ve seen for getting a narrated PowerPoint online.
The author suggests this would be good for a live presentation, where the presenter might be recorded, and then synching that recording with the slides. I suppose that’s one application, but I’m thinking how easy this would make it for a an instructor to pre-record a lecture, then join that up with the PowerPoint slides. It would be even better if you could actually make the recording as you view the slides rather than requiring an audio file. Perhaps this can be done with some command line magic, by pointing to a file that is being written to as you record?
Installing
Using SuperShow required me to install a few packages. The docs say you need GhostScript, SWFtools, Python, PyGTK, GSTreamer and PyGST. I already had most of these packages installed. On my Ubuntu Edgy system I had to install PyGST, so I installed python-gst and python-gst0.10 to be safe. I couldn’t find a package for SWFtools, so I had to download and install it. This actually turned out to be a little more complicated as it required more packages. When you compile it, be sure to pay attention to the output of ./configure as it will tell you any packages you’re missing. After installing libjpeg-progs libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev libungif4-dev libt1-dev t1lib-bin I was able to build and install SWFtools.
Once you have met the requirements, you can just run supershow by calling the python file (./supershow.py), or you can install it using the installer script.
Using SuperShow
It’s super simple. Fire it up, browse for your pdf, browse for your audio file, choose the output directory and name, and away you go. The audio starts playing and you see the first slide. Just click next slide when you want to advance to the next slide. The program will build the presentation once the audio file ends, so if you haven’t reached the end of the slideshow, I don’t think you’ll see those final slides. I’m away from home on my laptop and I don’t have a mic or I’d throw a simple example together.
What other applications can you recommend for narrating a PowerPoint presentation?
June 21st, 2007 - 4:34 pm
Thank you very much for the pointer to Supershow. I’ve used it, too, and confirm your review. It’s an easy-to-use, high quality, space-conserving way to generate a narrated presentation. I used audacity to record the narrative while flipping through the presentation manually. Then I synched the narrative with the presentation using SuperShow.
I searched for a long time, discovered swftools (but lack the expertise to use it), and finally discovered SuperShow. I have recommended SuperShow for packaging in the next ubuntu release. (swftools, for which SuperShow acts as a front-end, is already scheduled for packaging.)
I have made the following suggestions to the author, who has been receptive and kind throughout our correspondence:
(1) Add a checkbox to retain the intermediate files so that the synchronization can be edited without replaying the entire audio file.
(2) Add a SWF control panel so that the viewer can pause, play, skip forward and back.
You asked about alternatives. One is to use LaTeX (the typesetting language), with the latex-beamer package (to typeset presentations in LaTeX) and the movie15 package (to embed media files in LaTeX documents). This produces PDF files with embedded media. There is an enormous amount of control available (play automatically, coordinate playback to progress through the document, adjust playback speed, extract segments of media files, etc., etc.).
Fully functional playback appears limited to Adobe Reader on Mac and Windows. On Linux, the document can launch external viewers for the embedded media but the available PDF viewers (evince, acroread, kpdf) don’t have facilities to play back the media themselves.
latex-beamer is bundled with the basic LaTeX installation. The movie15 package is available from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/movie15/