IBM Personal Presenter

What is IBM Personal Presenter? IBM® Personal Presenter captures live video and audio, as well as still images, from either a window of choice or the entire desktop. This set of multimedia streams can be streamed to remote clients using standard RTP/RTSP (Real Time Protocol/Real Time Streaming Protocol), and it can be recorded simultaneously to a standard MPEG-4 file. The Presenter uses a single window that displays the captured still images and video side by side. The control is deliberately made easy: A presentation can be started with a single click. IBM Personal Presenter allows configuration of several key parameters, such as video size and still-image capture rate. The graphical user interface (GUI) is written in Java®, and the underlying functionality, including the capture, recording, encoding, and streaming, is implemented in C/C++. This technology runs on Windows® and Linux®.

How does it work?

After IBM Personal Presenter is started, a URL is displayed that can be copied and sent to clients who wish to connect. A client pastes the URL into the browser address window in order to run a Java applet player that will connect to IBM Personal Presenter automatically and start decoding and displaying the video, audio, and still images. The Java applet that constitutes the client is called IBM Personal Viewer and is hosted here on alphaWorks®. A stand-alone application version is included in the installation of IBM Personal Presenter on Windows; a separate installation soon will be available for Linux (as of yet without IBM Personal Presenter). IBM Personal Viewer can receive standard RTP/RTSP live and video-on-demand (VOD) streams and can play local MPEG-4 files. The MPEG-4 encoder/decoder used in IBM Personal Presenter was developed by the IBM Haifa Media Services and Technologies Group.