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Comment by stretchwithme | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be great if audio of a presentation were also available and the slides were played in sync with it?

Imagine if presentation software generated a coded tone for each transition that could be used later on to merge the recorded audio of the speaker and the slides into an audio slideshow.

Then having a video of your presentation would just be a side effect of your presentation. And it would focus on the material you wanted to present, not your image.

Although videos of speakers are nice, often the material the speaker is referring to isn't visible. It really should be the visual focus.

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I wish people would post their notes and not their slides. If I can understand your talk from your slides, your slides are way too detailed, and it might be more beneficial to just give everyone the text and not bother with the speaking, since it's so much slower than reading.

And if there's a video, I'm going to immediately go somewhere else. I don't have time to be watching hour-long videos when the content could be summarized in something I could read in 5 minutes.

Not everyone has notes. When I lecture, I do so from notes, but I usually do other presentations without them. I'll likely have created an outline, but it has less information than the slides.

InfoQ does this pretty well. Sadly, their website isn't the pinnacle of user experience.

My university uses [Mediasite](http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite) to record our lectures. It does a pretty good job of syncing slides to video, though it is Silverlight-based.

The only real problem is that it seems to detect slides based on delta with previous slide instead of getting information from the actual presentation. This means that if you switch to the lecturer's camera (which allows the lecturer to display text written on paper on a big screen) or write on the slide then it counts as a new slide.

Yep, this would be so great.

I've wished for so long that slides and presentations were synced, the best I've seen are videos like DEFCON where they have a small window for the presenter then slideshow.

This is a ridiculously easy to solve problem. Timecode, click tracks, or even just recording the output of the presentation machine are all viable and simple options. Conference organizers just have to do it.

And if presentation software played the tones, anybody could record the audio at even an informal meeting and tie it to the slides. The speaker could just do it with their phone.

If the presentation software makers wanted to close the loop, they could just give you an app that records the audio, listens for the tones, uploads it to their site where you've saved your slides and automatically put it all together where anybody can see the final product.

Something within the range of microphones but nothing that'll be annoying when the speaker changes slides?

That's a cool idea.

It isn't a new idea, it just may not be common. I've seen video/presentations for a decade. The implementation I remember used WMVs as the video source, but I'm sure it could have just as easily been WMA or another media format.

I wish were more common though.

Yes, its not new. My old company, Mentorware, created content from syncing slides and audio for the Java One conference starting in 2000.

But putting these together was a manual effort. This idea would eliminate that.

You'd only really need to synchronize the audio and slides at a single point (perhaps this could happen backstage, before the presentation begins). After this, you can just record relative timestamps for each slide transition.

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