Recording Events

Freeseer’s primary use case is recording large events such as conferences. You can run Freeseer locally and have the presenter record their desktop, but a much more useful configuration is when Freeseer is used from a dedicated laptop to record VGA output from the presenter’s laptop.

Equipment Needed

  • A working installation of Freeseer on a dedicated computer for recording
  • VGA Capture Device
  • Wireless Microphones
    • We use Sennheiser EW100 G2
  • USB extension cable (optional)

Setup

Preparation (Avoiding Common Errors)

  • Presentations that contain lots of animations or quick movements (e.g. live demos) are best recorded with a higher-end frame grabber since they output higher FPS.

  • Use the Talk Editor tool to enter all the talks and their info beforehand.

  • Do a test recording with your completed setup to make sure everything works.

  • Verify that the presenters don’t have their mics muted.

  • Have the presenter disable their screen saver and power saving mode. [1]

    • Linux users can use the caffeine app:

      sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install caffeine

Troubleshooting

  • If you only see the red indicator light on the VGA2USB device (the green one isn’t showing), and everything has worked previously, then it’s possible that the USB cable connecting the device is damaged.
  • When a new presenter’s laptop is plugged-in and you get a noisy signal the first time you hit record, then try stopping and restarting the recording.

Hosting the Videos

The Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre (FOSSLC) can place your videos on fosslc.org for free if the talks are open source related. FOSSLC will promote them on the site and host them on YouTube. The site is somewhat popular and gets quite a few hits from various communities. If you decide to use the services of FOSSLC, please email fosslc@gmail.com. Of course you can always use your own hosting solution.

Footnotes

[1]If the presenter’s laptop goes into power saving mode, then the vga2usb device loses the signal and you will have to pause and restart the recording.